SUSE's David Sterba was quite punctual in getting all of the Btrfs file-system updates submitted quickly for the newly-opened Linux 5.8 kernel merge window.

The MMC changes for new kernel cycles don't tend to be particularly noteworthy but it's a different story with the new Linux 5.8 kernel cycle.

Adding to the expected changes for Linux 5.8 is improved EXT4 and XFS file-system direct access "DAX" support.

Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space.

Announced at the end of April was Micron's HSE as a new open-source storage engine designed for offering speedy performance and lower latency on modern solid-based storage, especially for systems employing 3D XPoint technology. Version 1.7.1 of HSE was released today as their first open-source release since going public with this technology.

Reiser5 was announced back on New Year's Eve with support for local volumes and supporting parallel scaling out and other improvements over the long-in-development but never mainlined Reiser4. While Reiser5 was not met with enthusiasm, Edward Shishkin has continued working on this next-generation file-system and today announced the latest round of improvements.

Stemming from recent kernel discussions over a hypothetical new system call for reading small files more efficiently, Greg Kroah-Hartman has been working on the readfile() system call and it's looking like it is taking shape well enough to premiere soon in a new mainline kernel release.

Linux I/O expert Jens Axboe who oversees the kernel's block layer and is employed by Facebook while working on IO_uring and other storage innovations has recently been working on async buffered reads support.

FUSE for file-systems in user-space while being criticized by developers in the past and known for being slower than kernel native file-systems is seeing another write optimization come Linux 5.8.

A new patch series has been revived from work originally published by Micron back in 2018 for dealing with the behavior on their planar 2D NAND devices where in rare cases when issuing block erase commands, the flash block might not actually be erased and this could lead to further problems down the road when touching said block.

The ZFS file-system has long offered transparent file-system compression via the likes of LZ4 and Gzip and while now Zstd compression is under review for OpenZFS and seeking testing from the community.

For a number of months now various Google engineers have been working on inline encryption support for FSCRYPT in order to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs. That FSCRYPT side work is coming together and now also queued up for Linux 5.8 is plumbing inline encryption into blk-mq.

OpenZFS / ZFS On Linux 0.8.4 is out as the latest update to this leading open-source ZFS file-system base for Linux and FreeBSD and coming together as well for macOS.

Patches are pending that can sharply speed-up mount times of large EXT4 file-systems.

The Linux DM-Writecache target that allows for writeback caching to cache newly written data to an SSD or persistent memory will with Linux 5.8 see better performance out of Intel Optane like storage on newer platforms.

David Howells of Red Hat has been working to "massively overhaul" the code surrounding the kernel's local caching for network filesystems.

For a number of months now Google engineers have been working on FSCRYPT inline encryption capabilities for EXT4 and F2FS. The work is designed to offer better encryption performance on modern SoCs by having the encryption/decryption happen within the block layer as part of the bio and in turn leveraging the inline encryption hardware on modern Arm SoCs. The work still isn't merged but looks like it could be getting closer.

A new target for Linux's Device Mapper is EBS, the Emulated Block Size.

Micron announced today the "World’s First Open-Source Storage Engine Designed for SSDs and Storage Class Memory"... Or simply put, yet another key-value store database and this time designed for high performance SSDs and persistent memory.

Last year a SUSE developer sent out a set of patches adding authentication support to the Btrfs file-system. Btrfs already has checksums on meta-data blocks and data blocks while the original implementation of these authentication patches was performing HMAC on a SHA256 checksum as a keyed hash. A proper key in turn is then needed to mount a verified file-system.

With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux.

A few weeks ago the Samsung engineers responsible for the new Microsoft exFAT Linux kernel driver released exFAT-Utils as their user-space utilities for managing and creating exFAT file-systems under Linux. A new release is out and exFAT-Utils has been re-spun as exfatprogs.

Last week brought FreeBSD support merged into OpenZFS and it turns out there is another recently-merged exciting advancement for this cross-platform open-source ZFS file-system code in terms of a big speed boost.

FreeBSD developers have been working on transitioning to using OpenZFS as their ZFS file-system upstream code rather than the dormant Illumos base. That initial FreeBSD support has been mainlined this week into the OpenZFS repository, now providing a common code-base between for the open-source ZFS file-system code between Illumos, FreeBSD, Linux, and work-in-progress macOS.

With Linux 5.6 the flash-focused F2FS file-system added LZO and LZ4 compression support for enhancing performance and ideally extending flash storage life by reducing the amount of writes. Added meanwhile for the current Linux 5.7 cycle was F2FS Zstd compression support. Now looking ahead to Linux 5.8, it looks like LZO-RLE support is being baked.

There hasn't been much to report on this year for EROFS as the Huawei-developed read-only Linux file-system with Android devices in mind. But out this week is now erofs-utils as an update to the user-space utilities around this file-system.

A last minute feature coming into the Linux 5.7 kernel on its last day of the merge window is experimental support for allowing a remote swap setup over a network using SMB3.

At the same time of Linux receiving a new exFAT driver, the Linux kernel is still seeing improvements to its classic FAT file-system code.

The FreeDesktop.org UDisks project that provides a daemon and interface for querying and manipulating storage devices on Linux is approaching its long overdue version 2.9 update.

Last week the XFS file-system saw its first round of updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle that included preparations for supporting online repair in the future as well as many underlying code improvements. A second round of code improvements were sent in on Thursday for this mature file-system.