EXT4 For Linux 5.3 Gets Fixes & Faster Case-Insensitive Lookups

The EXT4 file-system updates have already landed for the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window that opened this week.

For Linux 5.3, EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts'o sent in primarily a hearty serving of fixes. There are fixes from coverity warnings being addressed to typos and other items for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system.

Besides a bit adding jbd2_inode dirty range scoping, about the only "feature" for EXT4 in Linux 5.3 is faster case-insensitive lookups. Collabora's Gabriel Krisman Bertazi who got the original EXT4 case-insensitive file/folder support in for the file-system back during Linux 5.2 managed an optimization for around 30% faster look-ups on large directories thanks to temporary caching. That's good news if you are making use of this optional feature such as for the likes of Wine-Staging.

The complete list of EXT4 changes for Linux 5.3 can be found via this PR.