F2FS Gets A Few Fixes For Linux 3.20

F2FS remains a very promising open-source file-system for targeting flash-based storage on Linux, though for Linux 3.20 the changes aren't too exciting.

Jaegeuk Kim, the maintainer of the Flash-Friendly File-System, sent in his pull request for the Linux 3.20 merge window. The changes for this kernel cycle mostly amount to fixes:

- Add f2fs_io_tracer and F2FS_IOC_GETVERSION
- Fix wrong acl assignment from parent
- Fix accessing wrong data blocks
- Fix wrong condition check for f2fs_sync_fs
- Align start block address for direct_io
- Add and refactor the readahead flows of FS metadata
- Refactor atomic and volatile write policies

Those are the major changes out of the couple dozen commits for Linux 3.20. The pull request in full can be found via this mailing list post.

In my most recent XFS vs. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS comparison benchmarks, F2FS was performing rather well, though it hasn't yet proven to be as mature as the other Linux file-systems. The lack of maturity and proving itself is why Fedora hadn't enabled F2FS, among other distributions. There's also not any F2FS port to any other non-Linux platforms yet that hinders its potential adoption as a leading file-system for flash storage devices.

In a few weeks time I'll have my usual Linux file-system comparison atop Linux 3.20. If you've tried out F2FS yourself, be sure to share your experiences within our forums.