F2FS Brings Compression Improvements To Linux 5.14

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues seeing new features and improvements to this file-system that is increasingly used by Android devices and other flash/SSD-focused systems.

F2FS for this new kernel has a compress_cache feature to improve random read performance. The compress_cache mount option allows using the address space of an inner inode to cache the compressed block to improve the cache hit ratio for random reads.

Also on the compression front is allowing compression for mmap files. This is part of the F2FS developers continuing to make optimizations with Android in mind.

F2FS also picked up a new read-only feature likely to be used by read-only partitions on Android moving forward. There are also other F2FS improvements like fully supporting swapfiles with file pinning and greater ATGC garbage collection tunability. Plus various bug fixes too.

The full list of F2FS patches for Linux 5.14 via this pull request sent out a short time ago on the kernel mailing list.