F2FS File-System Adding Zstd Compression Support In Linux 5.7

Being introduced by Linux 5.6 is optional F2FS transparent data compression support that was implemented with LZO and LZ4. Now for the Linux 5.7 kernel there is Zstd compression support on the way.

Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) maintainer Jaegeuk Kim today merged a patch from a Huawei engineer for supporting the Zstandard compression algorithm with this file-system level compression support. On Linux 5.7 and later it means setting compress_algorithm=zstd when mounting an F2FS file-system can enable this Zstd compression capability.

The Zstd support was one of many Huawei patches merged on Monday. Also notable with those patches is that the default compression algorithm shifted from LZO to LZ4. LZO is still supported obviously but by default LZ4 is now used. The developers found LZ4 to offer a similar compression ratio but at much faster decompression speeds.

The Linux 5.7 merge window is set to get underway in early April while for now this work is queued as part of the F2FS development tree.