F2FS Is Working Fine These Days With Fedora's Kernel

A Phoronix reader recently asked whether Fedora developers have yet enabled F2FS file-system support within their packaged kernel. While I didn't mention it before, yes, they ended up enabling support for the Flash-Friendly File-System.

Back in late December I wrote how Fedora didn't enable the F2FS kernel module as part of their kernel builds at the time. There had been bug reports requesting said support back to 2013, but the Fedora package maintainers at the time weren't interested in supporting yet another kernel module / file-system.

Fortunately, the Phoronix article spurred some discussions and they re-evaluated enabling F2FS in Fedora. One week after that article, Josh Boyer at Red Hat ended up enabling the CONFIG_F2FS_FS feature in Fedora Git. Thus for the past few months now, the latest Fedora 20 and Fedora 21 (along with F22) kernel builds do have the F2FS module.

Fedora already had the f2fs-tools package around for providing the user-space utilities to F2FS. So for those that didn't follow the bug report after the original article, sorry for not posting an update sooner, but yes, Fedora now plays fine (sans using it as the root file-system) with this open-source file-system optimized for flash storage devices and I did run some basic tests on it this weekend.

Here's the current configuration at the time of writing:

$ cat /boot/config-3.19.5-200.fc21.x86_64 | grep F2FS
CONFIG_F2FS_FS=m
CONFIG_F2FS_STAT_FS=y
CONFIG_F2FS_FS_XATTR=y
CONFIG_F2FS_FS_POSIX_ACL=y
CONFIG_F2FS_FS_SECURITY=y
# CONFIG_F2FS_CHECK_FS is not set