XFS Introduces A Sysfs Interface With Linux 3.17

The latest noteworthy pull request worth covering for the Linux 3.17 kernel merge window is of the XFS file-system updates.

Dave Chinner sent in the XFS pull request for Linux 3.17 on Tuesday. The changes this time around aren't anything jaw-dropping but just another minor step forward for this file-system competing with EXT4 and Btrfs. Perhaps the most notable change this time around is the introduction of a sysfs interface to the file-system. Below is Chinner's highlights for XFS on Linux 3.17.

- Conversion of the XFS core to pass negative error numbers
- Restructing of core XFS code that is shared with userspace to fs/xfs/libxfs
- Introduction of sysfs interface for XFS
- Bulkstat refactoring
- Demand driven speculative preallocation removal
- XFS now always requires 64 bit sectors to be configured
- Metadata verifier changes to ensure CRCs are calculated during log recovery
- Various minor code cleanups
- Miscellaneous bug fixes

The pull request with the complete run-down of changes can be found via the kernel mailing list. Once the merge window has passed, we'll be back with our usual SSD and HDD file-system benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, F2FS, and Btrfs to see any performance improvements or regressions over this cycle. Also sent in today were the UDF and ReiserFS updates for Linux 3.17 but to no surprise the changes there are mundane.