F2FS With Linux 5.18 Boasts Performance Improvements, Faster Recovery After Power-Cut

Jaegeuk Kim submitted the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates on Monday that today were merged to mainline for the Linux 5.19 cycle.

Making the F2FS work for Linux 5.18 notable is some performance improvements, particularly around Android workloads. F2FS storage with Android mobile devices remains a popular use-case for this flash-optimized file-system. The Android performance tuning deals with read-unfair read write semaphores and also new sysfs tunables around garbage collection and discard handling.

F2FS also has tuning to improve the recovery speed of F2FS file-systems after a sudden power-cut. The faster recovery time for F2FS comes via a new sysfs tunable to avoid long elapsed time to run roll-forward recovery.

Another notable feature addition for F2FS with Linux 5.18 is IDMAPPED mounts support. Other F2FS file-system changes this cycle mostly revolve around bug fixes.

The full list of F2FS patches for the Linux 5.18 merge window can be found via this pull request.

Linus pulled the changes but in regards to some of the work, Linus commented, "So it smells like there's something bad going on in f2fs." To which the developers are now discussing for making code improvements.