XFS For Linux 4.15 Brings "Great Scads of New Stuff"

File-system pull requests today for Linux 4.15 not only included Btrfs compression-related improvements, an overhaul to the AFS driver, and EXT4 corruption fixes but there is also a very significant set of updates to the XFS file-system.

Darrick Wong describes the XFS update for Linux 4.15 as delivering "great scads of new stuff."

Highlights he explains includes, "some substantive changes to XFS. The in-core extent mappings have been refactored to use proper iterators and a btree to handle heavily fragmented files without needing high-order memory allocations; some important log recovery bug fixes; and the first part of the online fsck functionality."

The start of online fsck support for XFS to scan for errors/corruption while the file-system is still mounted is exciting albeit for 4.15 disabled by default as still more work needs to land. The code refactoring will be interesting to benchmark for changes. In the process of these XFS driver reworks are also quite a number of bug fixes. All the details in the aforelinked pull request.