XFS Updates Submitted For Linux 4.1 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 23 April 2015 at 08:01 AM EDT. 4 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
Dave Chinner has sent in his XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.1 kernel.

Highlights of the XFS file-system update for Linux 4.1 are:

- RENAME_WHITEOUT support. Chinner explains this feature as, "Whiteouts are used by overlayfs - it has a crazy convention that a whiteout is a character device inode with a major:minor of 0:0. Because it's not documented anywhere...
In XFS rename terms, the operation that has been done is that source (foo) has been moved to the target (bar), which is like a normal rename operation, but rather than the source being removed, it have been replaced with a whiteout."

- The per-CPU superblock accounting has been changed to use generic counters.

- A new inode mmap lock to lock page faults.

- A rework of direct I/O submission and completion to take care of some data corruption issues under DIO writes.

- FALLOC_FL_INSERT_RANGE support to insert holes into a file via direct extent manipulation.

- Message logging improvements in case of problems.

- Bug-fixes and other code clean-ups.

The pull request in full can be viewed via the kernel mailing list.
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