XFS Gets Cleaned Up In Linux 5.3 Kernel Development Activity

While not too eventful on the end-user feature front, the XFS file-system has seen another round of clean-ups with the ongoing Linux 5.3 merge window.

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the feature work for XFS in Linux 5.3 as "significant amounts of consolidations and cleanups in the log code; restructuring of the log to issue struct bios directly; new bulkstat ioctls to return v5 fs inode information (and fix all the padding problems of the old ioctl); the beginnings of multithreaded inode walks (e.g. quotacheck); and a reduction in memory usage in the online scrub code leading to reduced runtimes."

It's not immediately exciting for end-users but hopefully will cleanup some open issues and the start of multi-threaded inode walks could help with performance along with the memory reduction work.

The complete list of Linux 5.3 XFS work can be found via this pull request.