F2FS File-System In Linux 3.11 Gets Updated

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 3 July 2013 at 01:49 PM EDT. 2 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
Samsung's Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has been updated for the Linux 3.11 merge window.

There isn't any groundbreaking advancements for the F2FS file-system in Linux 3.11, but it does take care of an F2FS regression I found on Linux 3.10. I found the F2FS performance to be slower with Linux 3.10 compared to Linux 3.9 for some workloads. Once showing the regression, it followed the usual stages of benchmark loss... Developers saying the Phoronix tests are flawed or invalid, the tests must be wrong, and/or we see no regression, etc etc.

Fortunately, upstream developers ended up ultimately finding the problem. As noted in the new pull request, "Another one is that it has been revealed the pgbench regression reported by phoronix was caused by one of fsync bug fixes in 3.10-rc1. In order to restore the performance, one enhancement patch was introduced in this patch-set, which is f2fs: recover wrong pino after checkpoint during fsync."

Aside from taking care of this bug, it also has major fixes concerning little and big endian conversion and support for xattr security labels as it's a feature required by using SEAndroid, the security enhanced version of Google's Android operating system.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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