The Andrew File-System (AFS) continues to evolve as a distributed file-system. Over the past year and a half there's been a lot of activity to AFS in the mainline Linux kernel, including material slated for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel but then Linus Torvalds ended up having to un-pull the changes.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues being supported by more Android-powered mobile devices and with this uptick in user activity is resulting in more fixes and low-level improvements to the file-system.

Ted Ts'o sent in the main EXT4 feature pull request today for the Linux 5.1 kernel merge window while David Sterba sent in a secondary batch of Btrfs material.

Recent kernels like Linux 4.20 brought various performance enhancements to FUSE, the kernel code allowing for file-systems to run in user-space. With Linux 5.1 there is additional FUSE optimization work.

The mature XFS file-system continues seeing new improvements and with the Linux 5.1 kernel is a fair amount of new material.

While we are very much looking forward to the huge ZFS On Linux 0.8 release, as a new stable release for offering up compatibility with the newly minted Linux 5.0 is now the ZoL 0.7.13 milestone.

The initial feature updates were sent in a short time ago for the Btrfs file-system changes targeting the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

One of the recent XFS innovations under work and maturing with time has been Copy on Write (CoW) support for this mature Linux file-systems. The XFS CoW support continues to be improved upon and an "always CoW" option is being prepared to always force this behavior.

Since November we haven't heard much about Google's effort around FS-VERITY as transparent integrity / authenticity support for read-only files on a writable file-system. Fortunately, the effort didn't stop and new patches are pending for this implementation that complements DM-VERITY.

For those that have been wanting to see case-insensitive filename support or even encoding of filenames in UTF-8 or other character encoding, the work is still on going.

Since the Linux 4.14 kernel Btrfs has supported Zstd for transparent file-system compression while a revived patch-set would allow that Zstd compression level to become configurable by the end-user.

The past few years Apple has been developing APFS as the successor to the long-used HFS+ file-system. The Apple File-System is in use with macOS 10.13+ iOS 10.3, and their other platforms for offering a lot of features not found in HFS+ including much better performance. There is an open-source APFS kernel driver now under development for Linux in supporting this file-system.

ZFS On Linux (ZOL) 0.8 is going to be a big release... No, a huge release. But for ensuring it's going to be a successful release, a third release candidate was just issued for further vetting of all the new code.

While the Linux 5.0 kernel has a lot of enticing features and improvements, if you rely upon ZFS On Linux (ZOL) you will probably want to hold off on trying the Linux 5.0 release candidates at this time.

While the Btrfs file-system supports many next-gen features from SSD optimizations to transparent file-system compression to snapshots, it hasn't natively offered any encryption support. There have been Btrfs encryption attempts in the past, but nothing that has panned out in mainline short of running Btrfs atop dm-crypt. A new patch series was published overnight having another go at adding AES encryption to Btrfs.

Waiting until the last day of the Linux 4.21 kernel merge window, Ted Ts'o sent in the fscrypt changes today adding Adiantum crypto support to this file-system encryption framework currently used by F2FS and EXT4.

While a few days ago I wrote about the Reiser4 port to the Linux 4.20 kernel being a work-in-progress, now it's officially been released with their first tagged patch release since Linux 4.18.

There hasn't been a formal Reiser4 file-system patch release since September when it was ported to the Linux 4.18 kernel, but via Git this week there is a port for the Linux 4.20 kernel should you want to utilize this once promising file-system under the latest stable patch series.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) has some new features for the current Linux 4.21 development cycle but it's mostly fixes stemming from increased testing with Google now supporting this flash-focused file-system for their Pixel device line-up.

Earlier this month were the FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs. Besides interest in seeing ZOL tests (they're already planned upon the ZFS On Linux 0.8 release), there was also some interest by readers in seeing some XFS RAID tests side-by-side. Here are some of those XFS RAID benchmarks up against Btrfs and EXT4 from Ubuntu Linux.

XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong has submitted the latest work for the Linux 4.21 kernel. The XFS changes for Linux 4.21 are overall light and predominantly focused on fixes and other low-level code improvements.

The Btrfs file-system hasn't supported Swap files on it in early a decade, but that support will be restored again with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel.

Adiantum, Google's newly developed crypto algorithm to replace their planned use of the controversial Speck, is ready to begin providing speedy file-system encryption support for low-end devices with the upcoming Linux 4.21 merge window.

The EXT4 file-system corruption issue on Linux 4.19 that also affected 4.20 development builds is now case closed for this pesky data corruption issue.

The saga about EXT4 file-system corruption on Linux 4.19 kernels that has increased in recent weeks might soon be drawing a close... This data corruption bug though is looking like it doesn't originate from within the EXT4 code at all.

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet provided an update to the kernel developers on his file-system over the weekend, following his Patreon post that updated followers on the latest for this "next-gen" Linux file-system born out of the block cache code.

In the works now for over three years has been BCachefs that doesn't receive nearly as much attention as Btrfs, Stratis, ZFS On Linux, or other next-gen Linux storage options, but it does continue making progress and still possesses a lot of potential.

Adding to the headaches around Linux 4.19 stable is an EXT4 file-system corruption issue that has yet to be sorted out.

Linux file-systems continue getting better along with the infrastructure around it in the VFS and block code, but still there are some pain points for both users and developers around Linux storage.

Back when Huawei introduced the EROFS Linux file-system earlier this year, there wasn't any open-source user-space utility for actually making EROFS file-systems. Even when EROFS was merged into the mainline tree, the user-space utility was still non-existent but now that issue has been rectified.