XFS Lands More Code For Linux 5.10 - "Even More Monumental"

Last week saw the XFS file-system with Linux 5.10 support timestamps until the year 2486 rather than year 2038 and other improvements too. This week a second round of XFS work has landed for Linux 5.10.

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong describes this week's file-system changes as "even more monumental than last week!"

XFS developers are announcing that in the Year 2030 they intend to deprecate their Version Four (V4) file-system format -- thus users have a decade to upgrade to the newer V5 format. Making use of the newer on-disk format means better metadata validation, support reflink and online fsck, and this support for timestamp handling beyond the year 2038.

A second deprecation notice was also issued that they will be deprecating their old Irix behavioral tweaks in five years, come September 2025.

This XFS code also has two changes to how XFS handles deferred metadata operations. That work should help ensure correct logical ordering of tasks/subtasks as well as improving the scalability of the log and reducing contention.

There are also "numerous small bugs" addressed in the XFS log recovery and other low-level work collected as part of the second pull request, which was merged to mainline on Monday.

The full list of these latest XFS file-system changes via this mailing list post.