XFS Gets Lazy Time Support In Linux 4.17, Other Improvements

Darrick Wong has submitted the XFS file-system updates targeting the Linux 4.17 kernel. It's a bit lighter than 4.15 and 4.16 that brought "great scads of new stuff", but there still is a fair amount of feature work taking place.

Years after EXT4 introduced the lazytime mount option for its file-system, XFS has now received lazytime mount option support too. Lazytime avoids writing a file's access time (atime) back to disk (like "noatime") but with lazytime the data will be kept within an in-memory inode so it can be provided if it will actually be used. This obviously makes for a performance win, but is not enabled by default at this time.

XFS for Linux 4.17 also has a number of code clean-ups, improvements to the on-disk meta-data checks, online scrub fixing, and a variety of other bug fixes.

A secondary pull request of XFS updates for Linux 4.17 is expected with more online scrubber improvements, including performance improvements.

More details on the XFS changes for the Linux 4.17 merge window here.