The upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel should see improved filesystem handling, including performance gains for SD cards and USB sticks, as well as FUSE. As for next-gen storage subsystems…not so much.
For a mature OS kernel, there are still huge improvements to Linux’s handling of legacy disk formats, and that should improve when kernel 6.2 comes out sometime in early 2023.
A patch by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo makes it faster to create new files or directories on an exFAT disk with lots of files – and the more files, the greater the improvement. This follows on from the same programmer earlier patch to improve exFAT management, in March.
Following Microsoft releases exFAT specification in 2019 and he enter the linux kernel In 2020, its support has continued to improve. Recently Linux has acquired the ability to repair exFAT volumesthanks to a patch from Samsung developer Namjae Jeon, which maintains the exFAT out of tree player for older kernels – like the one used in Android. His commit history shows many contributions from the Sony programmer. Another Samsung engineer, Jaeguk Kim, provided a patch to improve F2FS, the Flash Friendly File System.
Former Ubuntu engineer and now Microsoft Christian Braunner was busy, too. He sent a detail patch add a dedicated VFS API for POSIX ACLs. These have been supported for a long time, as you can see in this the description their operation since 2002, but the new version should clean up and simplify their handling. Brauner also presented a patch to support ID-mapped mounts for SquashFS volumes. This is complementary to its previous patch which introduced ID-mapped mounts, which also contains an explanation of how they work and what they are used for.
Improvements have also been made to some of the more established file systems. One is one list fixes and improvements for XFS, which targets the important new feature of online repair. Another patch brings performance improvements to volumes mounted with FUSE In other words, where filesystem code runs in a userspace program, not as part of the kernel. There are even bug fixes for the now venerable ext4.
There are also a few improvements in Btrfs, especially in its handling of RAID 5 and 6. In particular, a patch resolves “destructive read-modify-write” issue for Btrfs RAID5 (but not RAID6) arrays. This is a good thing, but these disk layouts are still not recommended. In the words of the product own documentation:
The feature should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing purposes.
Since this is a FOSS filesystem for a FOSS operating system, there are of course workarounds, such as using the Linux kernel builtin. mdraid supported through the mdadm , to create a RAID-6 volume, then format it with Btrfs. Our story on possible upgrade from older Debian installation mentioned that it was running LVM, on RAID, on LVM. This kind of thing is possible and people do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea if you’re not an old Linux ascendant.
Simplifying and integrating this kind of complex disk layout is exactly what next-gen file systems were meant to deliver, but as code changes continue to roll in, two of the most important have gone relatively quiet.
While Ubuntu continues to maintain its ZSys code, there is not much activity. It should be noted that there was no new message on the ZSys Blog Since the Ubuntu 20.04 period, some users are starting to interrogate what is going on, as well as whether it should be deleted.
It’s certainly not due to a lack of development in OpenZFS, which was released version 2.1.7 Earlier this month, with many updates and support up to Linux 6.0. There are also active and innovative external tools that use it, such as ZFSBootMenu. It is also supported in NixOS, the innovative cast we talked about last week.
On the Red Hat side, the stratis released team version 3.4 in November, and three minor point releases since then. However, the change log does not show very significant works. It always targets the Fedora version before the current version, eg. You can use it in RHEL 9, but there is still an unsupported technical preview, because it is did in RHEL 8 in 2019.
We could be wrong, but it seems to us that Canonical and Red Hat have lost interest in pushing this innovative technology forward. We would like to see someone else take over the projects, integrate them and improve them, like some Android vendors are doing with exFAT. This seems like a big opportunity for companies creating their own Ubuntu-based distros, such as Linux Mint and ZorinOS, that fix perceived weaknesses in the core desktop product. ®
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