Linux fsinfo() System Call Continues Maturing For Exposing More File-System + Mount Info

There has been a lot of interesting work happening in the Linux storage space in recent time like IO_uring, the countless file-system innovations, and other features -- including one addition that's now up to its nineteenth revision and is for providing more VFS/file-system and mount topology information.

David Howells of Red Hat has been working on the fsinfo() system call for the Linux kernel in exposing more VFS and mount information to user-space along with notification support when the mount topology changes.

The aim is to more easily expose a lot more VFS/file-system/mount information than currently is available in user-space as well as adding a watch_mount() call to allow being notified when any underlying file-system mounts change.

Published this week was the v19 VFS patches that add in the new infrastructure and also wire in sample implementations for EXT4, AFS and NFS.

The code is still going through some churn (hence all the revisions) so at this stage it's not clear if it will be ready in time for the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel, but probably not. In any case, this is one of the interesting patch series to watch this year on the Linux storage front. More details on the kernel mailing list.