EXT4, XFS & exFAT Enjoy Some Nice Improvements With Linux 5.13
The EXT4 file-system driver updates were merged today. One prominent feature there is allowing both casefolding and encryption to be enabled at the same time. EXT4 has supported both case-folding/case-insensitive file/folders as well as native encryption support, but not both at the same time, until now.
In addition to handling encrypted case-folding, EXT4 with this next kernel version also now ensures deleted file names are cleared in the directory blocks by zeroing out the directory entries. EXT4 has also seen some performance work with the block allocator when running on a freshly mounted file-system by pre-fetching block bitmaps.
Meanwhile this week also saw the XFS changes merged. XFS work includes efforts towards being able to shrink a file-system albeit is still a work-in-progress. XFS has also seen a number of performance improvements thanks to different changes/optimizations this cycle.
Meanwhile the exFAT changes include faster write performance when using the "dirsync" option, improved look-up performance, FITRIM ioctl support, and a fix for the DISCARD option handling.
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