F2FS Added Zstd Compression With Linux 5.7 While Now is Working On LZO-RLE

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked.

The LZO-RLE extension provides Run-Length Encoding that is designed to improve the LZO algorithm in scenarios where many zeros may be present, such as on file-systems. Linux's Zram already uses LZO-RLE by default and now the Flash-Friendly File-System is toying with LZO-RLE as another compression option for better performance and reducing the writes to disk.

This LZO-RLE wiring up for F2FS was contributed by a Huawei engineer. Currently this support is in F2FS' dev-test branch while if all goes well with the LZO-RLE evaluation could end up in the Linux 5.8 kernel this summer. The existing LZO / LZ4 / Zstd compression options will remain available.