F2FS Sees An Assortment Of File-System Improvements With Linux 4.16

With each Linux kernel cycle the F2FS file-system that has been part of the mainline kernel now for five years, this "Flash-Friendly File-System" gets a bit more mature and featureful.

F2FS again has seen more feature work and other improvements queued for Linux 4.16. This cycle seems somewhat like a random assortment of improvements for this file-system designed for SSDs and other flash-based storage devices.

F2FS now has improvements around supporting write hints for direct I/O, readahead support to improve the read directory speed, reserve_root/resuid/resgid options for reserving blocks, support for cgroup writeback, support for handling the inode creation time, and implementing other bits around pre-cache extents and other attributes.

F2FS for Linux 4.16 also has fixes around memory footprint accounting, sysfs-based quota operations, deadlock fixes, and other corrections.

The complete list of F2FS changes for the Linux 4.16 merge window can be found via this pull request. Once the 4.16 merge window is over I'll be doing our usual Linux file-system benchmark comparisons on Phoronix.