FSINFO System Call, Mount Notifications Sent In For Linux 5.7 To Provide Better Storage Details

Red Hat's David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel.

This stems from work Howells has been pursuing for the past several months for exposing more file-system information and mount notifications. The fsinfo() system call exposes more file-system / VFS information like file-system UUIDs, capabilities, mount attributes, and other possible bits. With the fsinfo() pull request are also implementations for EXT4 and NFS.

The fsinfo() system call also addresses issues in user-space reading /proc/mounts and similar interfaces currently. See this pull request for more details.

Sent in following that was general notification queue and key notifications. That in turn was done for supporting mount and superblock notifications. This side of the work allows for notifications around file-system mounting/unmounting, superblock changes like going read-only, quota overruns, I/O errors, and other important events.

So assuming Linus Torvalds has no issues with these additions, the fsinfo() system call and mount notifications will be part of the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel.