Merged today were all the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel.
Linux Storage News Archives
936 Linux Storage open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2008.
Joining the other file-systems seeing notable updates for Linux 6.9, the XFS file-system is seeing continued work around online repair support and other improvements.
If you were feeling adventurous and began using the Bcachefs file-system upon its introduction in Linux 6.7 mainline and using it for a multi-device setup, you are best off upgrading to Linux 6.8 as soon as possible due to known issues with the code in v6.7.
The FUSE passthrough mode that's been years in the making for better performance was merged upstream today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel!
Earlier this week with the original Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.9 Linus Torvalds wasn't happy with some of the code pertaining to spinning out a new library code so that it could be re-used by at least the XFS file-system. A revised pull request was since submitted without that library spin-out and Torvalds today went ahead and merged that updated file-system driver.
Since the Bcachefs file-system was upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel it's been humming along fairy well. But today the Bcachefs feature updates were sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window and Linus Torvalds isn't happy about some of the proposed code.
As a follow-up to the article earlier this month around DeviceMapper's Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) preparing to be upstreamed, it was successfully merged today by Linus Torvalds as the newest shiny feature of Linux 6.9.
SUSE's David Sterba sent out the Btrfs updates today for the Linux 6.9 merge window. Besides stabilization and bug fixes there are also some minor performance optimizations to see with this next kernel.
The optional case-insensitive file/folder handling under Linux that's hooked up for various file-systems like EXT4 and F2FS will benefit from improved performance on the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle.
Merged two years ago with Linux 5.15 with the "NTFS3" driver developed by Paragon Software with working read-write support and other improvements for supporting Microsoft's NTFS file-system driver. This driver was a big improvement over the original NTFS read-only driver found in the mainline kernel and faster than using the NTFS-3G FUSE file-system driver. Now with enough time having passed and the NTFS3 driver working out well, the older NTFS driver is set for removal.
The Linux DeviceMapper code is preparing to introduce DM-VDO as the Virtual Data Optimizer that can provide inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, thin provisioning, and other features. DM-VDO has long existed out-of-tree and should be a very useful addition to mainline.
Being worked on and off for several years has been FUSE read/write passthrough support for improving the performance of File-Systems in User-Space by avoiding the daemon overhead on a per-file basis where read/write operations are forwarded by the kernel directly to the lower file-system rather than the FUSE daemon. FUSE passthrough mode has shown to be a big performance win and it looks like it could be finally mainlined come Linux 6.9.
Kent Overstreet on Saturday evening posted a set of 21 patches to overhaul the disk accounting code for the Bcachefs file-system. This change does break compatibility with the existing disk accounting on-disk format and thus will require an upgrade when moving to the new version, which may land for Linux v6.9.
A request for comments patch series was posted today for FAMFS, a new special purpose file-system proposal out of Micron for dealing with Fabric-Attached Memory (FAM) devices such as will become more common within the Compute Express Link (CXL) server space.
OpenZFS 2.2.3 is out today as the first update to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation since OpenZFS 2.2.2 from early December when it was released for dealing with a data corruption issue.
The Bcachefs file-system that was mainlined to the Linux kernel last year has received a grant from the NLNet Foundation.
The folks at iXsystems and Klara are contributing Fast Dedup support to upstream OpenZFS and beginning to roll out this improved deduplication support within TrueNAS SCALE starting next month.
At the end of last year OpenZFS 2.2.2 was released to fix a rare but nasty data corruption issue but it turns out there are other data corruption bug(s) still lurking in the OpenZFS file-system codebase.
There's been much excitement around the Bcachefs file-system since it was mainlined in the Linux kernel at the end of last year. Looking ahead to Linux 6.9 it's looking like it may be one of the first file-system drivers to begin making use of the Rust programming language.
Overnight the latest fixes to the Linux 6.8 kernel were merged including two that are "serious" and will be back-ported to the existing stable Linux 6.7 kernel as well.
It's been just shy of four months since the Incus 0.1 release as a fork of the LXD project after Canonical re-asserted control over LXD last summer. Incus though is showing great potential and should be an interesting 2024.
Merged overnight for Linux 6.8 is enhancing the EROFS read-only open-source file-system to perform better in low-memory scenarios. Not just better, but significantly better performance.
More than one week ago was the main Bcachefs feature pull for Linux 6.8 that included further enhancing the performance and other features of this new file-system merged back in Linux 6.7. Yesterday, just prior to the Linux 6.8-rc1 release, a secondary set of Bcachefs updates were merged for this next kernel version.
Following the work on enhancing the scalability of the MQ-Deadline I/O scheduler, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has applied similar scalability improvements to the BFQ I/O scheduler.
Days after delivering a nice boost to Linux I/O performance, Linux storage expert Jens Axboe has tackled another storage-related bottleneck within the kernel.
ReiserFS file-system creator Hans Reiser who is currently remains imprisoned in California for murdering his wife in 2006 has commented on the Linux kernel mailing list by way of a letter exchange from prison.
The Global File-System 2 (GFS2) for Linux clusters continues to advance thanks to Red Hat and with Linux 6.8 there is now support for non-blocking lookups.
IO_uring creator and Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe spent about five minutes working on two patches to implement caching for issue-side time querying in the block layer and can yield 6% or more better I/O performance.
Merged back at the start of the Linux 6.8 merge window were the VFS mount API updates that introduce two new system calls: statmount() and listmount() for reading more detailed information about file-system mounts.
While not as notable as the Bcachefs additions, more work on XFS online repair, and other file-system updates for Linux 6.8, the Btrfs file-system driver changes for Linux 6.8 were merged last week.
Pengutronix a short time ago on the Linux kernel mailing list announced the Open ISOBUS FileServer (FS) and Client Implementation... Piquing my interest, I looked up this ISO 11783-13 standard that this file server aims to implement, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting.
The read-only EROFS open-source file-system continues to prove quite popular for Android mobile devices as well as containerized environments. With the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel EROFS adds initial support for sub-page compressed data support.
In addition to the Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.8, the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have also been separately submitted for the ongoing Linux 6.8 merge window.
Following the Bcachefs file-system having finally been upstreamed in the Linux 6.7 kernel, with the Linux 6.8 merge window now ticking the file-system's lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted a set of feature additions and performance optimizations to this copy-on-write (CoW) file-system.
Last year the online repair functionality for XFS began to land with the Linux 6.6 kernel. For the in-development Linux 6.8 kernel, more online repair support for the XFS file-system is now ready.
As part of the VFS changes submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window, a new "BLK_DEV_WRITE_MOUNTED" Kconfig option is added that allows controlling whether writes are allowed to mounted block devices.
Ahead of Linux 6.7 releasing next weekend, there's another set of Bcachefs file-system driver fixes on their way to the mainline kernel.
The Bcachefs file-system has landed some additional fixes ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.7 stable release.
Red Hat engineers have been developing Initoverlayfs as a scalable initial file-system. The code is currently in early form and the developers are still looking for feedback from the community as well as figuring out whether it properly belongs in kernel or user-space.
Of the many new features in Linux 6.7, one of the items exciting Phoronix readers the most is the merging of the long-in-development Bcachefs file-system.
On Friday another round of fixes were merged for the Bcachefs file-system for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel.
Following a rare but nasty data corruption issue, OpenZFS 2.2.2 and OpenZFS 2.1.14 were released this evening to address the problem.
Coming up for the Linux 6.8 kernel the Btrfs file-system is preparing to make use of the newer Linux file-system mounting API.
Last week OpenZFS 2.2.1 was released with a reported fix for a data corruption issue that was initially blamed as being a block cloning bug for a new feature introduced in the v2.2 release. Well, it turns out that the block cloning feature isn't the root cause and that v2.2.1 is still prone to data corruption and pre-v2.2 releases are also vulnerable to this file-system data corruption issue.
Those using OpenZFS 2.2 will want to update to OpenZFS 2.2.1 right away. A block cloning bug was uncovered that is causing data corruption issues for users.
In addition to the OpenZFS code this week landing sync parallelism to improve write performance scalability, another shiny new feature was also merged: RAIDZ expansion.
With Linux 6.7 the EROFS read-only file-system intended primarily for mobile devices and containers is considering their MicroLZMA compression support as stable.
Following last week's merging of the Bcachefs file-system into Linux 6.7, a secondary set of updates were merged today for adding a few new features as well as some fixes for this newly-merged Linux file-system.
A very enticing performance optimization was merged yesterday into the OpenZFS codebase to enhance the write performance scalability.
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues to be improved upon in the mainline Linux kernel and with the ongoing v6.7 merge window has received some additional enhancements.
936 Linux Storage news articles published on Phoronix.