F2FS With Linux 5.10 Brings Many Improvements And A Few More Features

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that is of growing prominence on Android-powered mobile phones and other flash-storage-only Linux systems has some promising improvements with Linux 5.10.

The F2FS feature updates for Linux 5.10 are rather exciting this round. Some of the changes for F2FS with this late 2020 kernel include:

- Age Threshold Garbage Collection (ATGC) for better efficiency and effectiveness of the file-system's garbage collector.

- There is also a patch by Google engineers to change the virtual mapping for compression pages where on the likes of the Pixel 3 it bumped up the decompression speed from 137M/s to 503M/s.

- Support for zone capacity with NVMe Zoned Namespaces (NVMe ZNS) that is part of the NVMe 2.0 specification.

- Generic casefolding support that is now shared with the EXT4 file-system.

- Support for in-memory segment management.

- A number of bug fixes particularly around Zstd compression and other data compression in general. The F2FS compression support is now in better shape that it could be considered evaluated for production use.

More details on the F2FS changes for Linux 5.10 via this pull.