F2FS Continues Furthering Its Encryption, Per-File Data Compression Capabilities

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) continues seeing new work around its transparent data compression, optional case insensitive behavior, and native encryption support with the new code queued for Linux 5.11.

As previously outlined, F2FS with Linux 5.11 now allows for casefolding with encryption. While F2FS has supported both case-folding (case insensitive files/folders) and native encryption, it hasn't allowed both to work together... Until Linux 5.11. Specialized handling was required for supporting both features at the same time.

On the compression front, developers continue work on per-file compression abilities. There are new ioctls and a related mount option for allowing per-file compression support. The mount option is compress_mode= for either a value of "fs" for the entire file-system or "user" for leaving it up to the user for selecting the files to be compressed.

F2FS with Linux 5.11 is also seeing checksum support for compressed clusters to detect any corrupted cluster, an improvement to avoid I/O starvation by replacing mutex usage with reader/writer semaphores, and a number of bug fixes throughout the file-system driver.

The full list of F2FS changes for Linux 5.11 can be found via the kernel mailing list.