XFS & EROFS File-Systems Have Big Changes For Linux 5.15

In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

XFS for Linux 5.15 has "a lot in this cycle" from fixes to features. XFS with Linux 5.15 now has batch inode activations in per-CPU background threads that should improve directory tree deletion times. Pipelining has also been enabled for the XFS log that should help with performance around handling of lots of metadata updates. XFS also has proposed inode btree counters and support for dates beyond Year 2038 as being officially supported features. Both the inode btree counters and Y2038 handling should be enabled by default with future xfsprogs updates.

XFS also has several fixes that are landing for Linux 5.15. The full list of XFS changes via this pull request.

EROFS as the relatively new read-only Linux file-system has also been seeing much work lately. On the EROFS front there is now support for direct I/O and FSDAX direct access to uncompressed files. This was done to avoid double caching for loop devices and VM container use-cases. EROFS also now offers FIEMAP support for files using the IOMAP infrastructure. Chunk-based uncompressed file support for data deduplication is also ready in furthering EROFS efforts around VM container usage.

The list of EROFS changes for Linux 5.15 via this PR.