F2FS With Linux 5.9 Adds Secure TRIM, New Garbage Collection Option

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have been sent in for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.

The prominent changes this cycle include a new garbage collection mode (GC_URGENT_LOW) and a "secure" TRIM option (F2FS_IOC_SEC_TRIM_FILE) in the name of security.

The F2FS_IOC_SEC_TRIM_FILE functionality is intended as secure erase functionality. For drives not supporting TRIM/DISCARD, zeroing out the given data range for the regular file is performed to ensure the data is wiped on disk.

GC_URGENT_LOW meanwhile is a new garbage collection mode submitted by Google engineers for running some lower-priority garbage collection tasks in the background.

F2FS for Linux 5.9 has also seen some work to improve (shorten) read latencies and other latency issues within the file-system. A number of bugs have also been fixed in the file-system driver code.

More details on the F2FS file-system changes for Linux 5.9 via this pull request.