Linux Kernel 5.19 will optimize exFAT EXT4 and XFS filesystems

Linux Kernel 5.19 will optimize exFAT, EXT4 and XFS filesystems

Linux Kernel 5.19 will optimize exFAT, EXT4 and XFS filesystems.

In addition to updates for the Btrfs filesystem, Linux Kernel 5.19, which is under development, has optimizations for the exFAT, EXT4, and XFS filesystems.

During the merge window, the Linux team will definitely fix multiple bugs with the EXT4, exFAT, and EROFS filesystems, and add some interesting features.

Among them, there are mainly two updates for the exFAT file system.

One is that Sony engineers contributed about a 73% performance boost when handling zeroing the cluster by reducing the number of block requests. This is a big improvement for exFAT.

Another improvement for exFAT is the new “sys_tz” mount option.

This is to use the system time zone as the time offset when dealing with exFAT timestamps that are treated as UTC offsets from the current local time.

What follows is an EROFS update to the read-only Linux filesystem originally developed by Huawei , used by some Android devices .

A major change to EROFS in Linux 5.19 is the on-demand loading of EROFS using the FSCACHE/CacheFiles infrastructure.

This introduces a new file-based backend and other improvements. See the Git merge linked earlier for all the details.

In addition to EROFS now supporting mount-on-demand support on FSCACHE, Linux 5.19 now supports IDMAPPED mounts, support for NFS exports, and various fixes.

The EXT4 update focuses on various bug fixes and cleanups.

Bug fixes include items found through different fuzzers and bug injection tools.

Overall, this widely used Linux filesystem has relatively light cycles.