F2FS Enables Discard By Default, Performance Enhancements

Jaegeuk Kim, the creator and lead developer of the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS), has finally submitted the big feature updates slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

There are a lot of goodies for F2FS on flash storage / SSDs come Linux 4.19. There are a lot of performance enhancements and other useful fixes and improvements with this file-system driver:

- The previously mentioned big performance fix for multi-threaded reads is in this pull request.

- TRIM/discard (-o discard) is now enabled by default.

- A new mount option is fsync_mode=nobarrier to bypass the cache flush command.

- In-memory inode checksums to verify the blocks.

- More sanity checks.

- Various other fixes and enhancements.

The dozens of changes in total for F2FS in Linux 4.19 can be found via this pull request. I'll certainly be running some benchmarks once Linux 4.19-rc1 is out given the performance changes.