XFS In Linux 4.16 Continues With "Great Scads Of New Stuff"

Back during the Linux 4.15 kernel merge window XFS file-system maintainer Darrick Wong commented there was great scads of new stuff and now with Linux 4.16 he's repeating that line. XFS for Linux 4.16 brings several significant changes to this mature Linux file-system.

XFS for Linux 4.16 restructures metadata verifiers to provide more information in the event of failures, enhancements to the online fsck feature, and preparations to remove the experimental tag from a few XFS features.

Here are the highlights from the pull:

- Log faulting code locations when verifiers fail, for improved diagnosis of corrupt filesystems.
- Implement metadata verifiers for local format inode fork data.
- Online scrub now cross-references metadata records with other metadata.
- Refactor the fs geometry ioctl generation functions.
- Harden various metadata verifiers.
- Fix various accounting problems.
- Fix uncancelled transactions leaking when xattr functions fail.
- Prevent the copy-on-write speculative preallocation garbage collector from racing with writeback.
- Emit log reservation type information as trace data so that we can compare against xfsprogs.
- Fix some erroneous asserts in the online scrub code.
- Clean up the transaction reservation calculations.
- Fix various minor bugs in online scrub.
- Log complaints about mixed dio/buffered writes once per day and less noisily than before.
- Refactor buffer log item lists to use list_head.
- Break PNFS leases before reflinking blocks.
- Reduce lock contention on reflink source files.
- Fix some quota accounting problems with reflink.
- Fix a serious corruption problem in the direct cow write code where we fed bad iomaps to the vfs iomap consumers.
- Various other refactorings.
- Remove EXPERIMENTAL tag from reflink!

The list of the XFS changes for Linux 4.16 can be found here. Our usual Linux file-system tests will come once the Linux 4.16 merge window is over.