F2FS Low-Memory Mode, Atomic Write Improvements For Linux 6.0

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues showing its a formidable file-system option for flash memory devices, especially SSDs and mobile hardware. With Linux 6.0 there are yet more improvements for this file-system driver.

F2FS with Linux 6.0 introduces the new low-memory mode previously covered on Phoronix. This allows altering the file-system's behavior for low-end Android devices and other memory starved devices. F2FS will be more conservative in turn to conserve memory space at the cost of possible performance implications.

F2FS with Linux 6.0 also has improvements around its atomic write operations, tuning around the foreground garbage collection time, fixes, and more.

F2FS maintainer Jaegeuk Kim summed up the work this cycle as:

In this cycle, we mainly fixed some corner cases that manipulate a per-file compression flag inappropriately. And, we found f2fs counted valid blocks in a section incorrectly when zone capacity is set, and thus, fixed it with additional sysfs entry to check it easily. Lastly, this series includes several patches with respect to the new atomic write support such as a couple of bug fixes and re-adding atomic_write_abort support that we removed by mistake in the previous release.

More details via the pull request.