Btrfs Changes Land In Linux 6.14 With New RAID1 Round-Robin Option

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 21 January 2025 at 04:35 PM EST. 2 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Btrfs with Linux 6.14 introduces an experimental RAID1 round-robin read mode as previously covered plus several other adjustments to this copy-on-write file-system. The highlights include:

- There are more read I/O balancing strategies as experimental options. Namely for testing purposes is the ability to select a preferred device for all reads. Or there is also a new round-robin mode that balances reads across devices relevant for the requested I/O range. These new modes are relevant for RAID1 read operations.

- Btrfs added an encoded write ioctl for IO_uring to complement the encoded read support added in Linux 6.12.

- Support for FS_IOC_READ_VERITY_METADATA where applications can make use of that VERITY metadata for their own verification purposes. The VERITY metadata from a file includes the Merkle tree, the descriptor, and the built-in signature where available.

- The Btrfs RAID stripe tree has various fixes, hole punching support to the extent range, reducing the number of stripe tree lookups on bio submission, and better test coverage.

- Error handling improvements for Btrfs.

- Various other code clean-ups, fixes, and minor enhancements.

More details on these Btrfs feature changes via this pull.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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