There Is Finally A User-Space Utility To Make EROFS Linux File-Systems

Back when Huawei introduced the EROFS Linux file-system earlier this year, there wasn't any open-source user-space utility for actually making EROFS file-systems. Even when EROFS was merged into the mainline tree, the user-space utility was still non-existent but now that issue has been rectified.

EROFS is the "Extendable Read-Only File-System" that Huawei is developing for possible use on future mobile (Android) devices. EROFS is designed to perform better than other read-only file-systems while supporting better compression capabilities and other features. The user-space "mkfs" code was previously held up apparently in the company's open-source processing.

EROFS was merged to Linux 4.19 staging and saw a few updates in the current Linux 4.20 cycle. The file-system is still being treated as "staging" as the on-disk format isn't necessarily finalized.

At the end of the week, EROFS developers published a new erofs-utils Git tree. This erofs-utils contains the initial erofs-mkfs component for making an EROFS file-system and basic features so far like compression support.

We'll see where the read-only EROFS file-system moves in 2019.