XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has "A Lot Going On This Time"

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."

On the feature front for Linux 5.12, this mature file-system has seen work to speed up freezing when read-only workloads are still running, refactoring to the logging code, faster fsync and garbage collection scans, and continued work towards being able to support shrinking XFS file-systems.

Particularly on the garbage collection front, the XFS code has seen a lot of improvements. -- including making more of the code multi-threaded. Background file garbage collection might also be ready for the Linux 5.13 kernel or shortly after that point otherwise.

XFS is also enjoying a number of bug fixes and other code improvements as outlined via this pull request. Darrick also sent in the IOmap code updates for Linux 5.12 that add the ability for XFS to try unaligned direct I/O overwrites without taking locks.

It's great seeing the continued XFS features and improvements in addition to the recent surge of feature/performance work around the likes of Btrfs and the out-of-tree OpenZFS as well. Plus perhaps this year we still might see the likes of Bcachefs merged to mainline as another promising Linux storage effort.