Linux 5.17: Quicker Mount Times For XFS, Few New Features For EXT4

In addition to the Btrfs updates, the EXT4 and XFS file-system maintainers submitted their feature changes already for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel.

The main feature change for XFS with Linux 5.17 is the mount code only trying to free stale CoW staging extents if the file-system unmounted cleanly. In turn this means XFS mount times should be lower, especially for file-systems supporting reflinks and having a large number of allocation groups.

The other submitted XFS material is focused on various file-system bug fixes. See this pull request from Darrick Wong for all the XFS feature changes for v5.17.

Ted Ts'o on Monday sent in the EXT4 updates. Feature work there includes switching to the new Linux mount API and the common get/set label ioctls. Those ioctls are already supported by Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS for online file-system label modification via a common interface for user-space.

EXT4 is also seeing bug fixes and code clean-ups. See the PR for the full list of patches for that common Linux file-system.