F2FS Might Get Enabled In Fedora

On Sunday I wrote about how I found it surprising that Fedora didn't enable F2FS support within its Linux kernel while it packaged the user-space F2FS tools and contains plenty of other experimental/early-adoption features. The discussion resulting from this article about F2FS for Fedora has been both good and bad.

F2FS is a very interesting open-source, Linux file-system designed for flash-based devices whether it be a SSD or SD/SDHC storage or a USB flash drive. Benchmarks have been very promising for F2FS, which is what has me most interested in this Linux file-system is from the performance perspective. However, the file-system is still considered experimental although it's been in the kernel for two years -- F2FS was merged in Linux 3.8.

Fedora developers have yet to enable the F2FS file-system module within their kernel. While initially from the old bug reports it wasn't clear why Fedora developers weren't behind F2FS, it appears to largely come down to a maintenance burden with having to respond to potential bug reports about users trying out F2FS on Fedora, etc.

While some upstream Fedora users have been rightfully disgusted how some Phoronix readers reacted to the situation and their comments (I've equally been disgusted by some of the comments too) -- both in our forums and on the Fedora mailing list -- it looks like F2FS for Fedora might be re-evaluated. Josh Boyer of the Fedora kernel team wrote on the mailing list, "We'll likely enable it after looking at it a bit more. We'll deal with that in the reopened bug. It won't be a high priority item in terms of bug reports and handling."

Hopefully by Fedora 22 we'll see the kernel shipping with F2FS support enabled given that f2fs-tools is still in the Fedora repository, so those wishing to experiment with the Flash Friendly File-System can easily do so without having to build their own kernel.