Linux Storage News Archives

Following the FUSE improvements in Linux 7.3 for file-systems in user-space, it looks like the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be ready to enable the large folios feature.

Earlier this year developers at LINBIT began working toward a goal of upstreaming ~15 years worth of their Distributed Replicated Block Device changes into the mainline Linux kernel. That major update has yet to land but sent out this week was a new patch series in preparing the trek toward introducing DRBD 9 support in the mainline kernel.

NTFS-3G 2026.9.18 was released this morning as the newest update to this FUSE-based open-source driver for NTFS file-system support.

Merged today were this week's set of Btrfs file-system fixes for the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel, which include two notable bug fixes.

More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading.

Released on Wednesday was a new version of the Dragonfly database that continues to promote itself as "the world's most efficient in-memory data store" and a modern replacement to the likes of Redis and Memcached while being fully compatible with their APIs.

The latest upstream file-system to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel is... BFS.

The EROFS read-only file-system popular for embedded systems, containers, and other use-cases has resorted to temporarily disabling its LZ4 rolling decompression support due to data corruption concerns.

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he's posted some "crazy" patches delivering some significant gains.

In addition to the still-pending kernel work for improving the in-kernel Zstd code, sepaarately the Btrfs file-system driver has an improvement on the way in its decompression code path for the Zstd transparent file-system compression.

Being worked on the past few months for the Linux kernel has been an AVX-512 optimized version of xor_gen() that is used for generating and validating parity blocks such as with Linux's software RAID 5 and RAID 6 arrays. The latest iteration of AVX-512 xor_gen() was posted today and shows some impressive results on AMD Zen 5 hardware.

WinBtrfs is a driver for Microsoft Windows to support reading and writing to Btrfs file-systems. WinBtrfs works with Windows XP and newer. It hadn't seen a new release in over two years but a big feature release is now available with a combination of new features and bug fixes.

Coming in as a late pull request ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window closing this weekend were the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates that have now made it into Linux Git.

The Unsorted Block Images "UBI" layer in the Linux kernel for NAND flash memory tracking and wear leveling finally has the notion of per-device wear-leveling thresholds.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Chris Mason is departing Meta. In the process of doing so, he is also stepping down from his co-maintainership role of the Btrfs file-system.

With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space.

The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window.

KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

The Linux kernel's FUSE code for enabling file-systems in user-space is enjoying some nice speed boosts with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel.

The pull requests for the existing Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver as well as the new modern "NTFS" drivers have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel cycle. Besides bug fixes, most notable among these NTFS file-system drivers are Windows System Compression "WOF" read support for the modern NTFS driver.

The Linux Device Mapper "DKM" framework for mapping block devices to higher-level virtual block devices doesn't see any major new features for Linux 7.3 but there are many bug fixes, including code clean-ups carried out by AI.

Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection.

The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system.

There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons.

The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS.

A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system.

OpenZFS 2.4.4 is out today as the newest stable point release for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

FSCRYPT is the Linux file-system encryption framework for supporting per-directory, transparent encryption. FSCRYPT so far is used by the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and CephFS. For Linux 7.3 there is an important clean-up to the FSCRYPT code to simplify it while also opening the door for new features moving forward into future kernel versions.

In addition to the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4.

David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system feature updates today that target the Linux 7.3 merge window. Among other changes are more performance improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system.

It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames.

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES.

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system.

Google engineer Eric Biggers back in June posted an AVX-512 optimization for Linux RAID yielding up to a 41% improvement on a modern AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) processor. A revised patch then put it as much as a 43% improvement for this AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() function. The code hasn't yet been merged to mainline but an updated version of it is now available.

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight.

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4.

Back during the Linux 7.2 merge window the Btrfs file-system dropped its COW fixup mechanism, which was used to detect dirty pages without an ordered extent. This code was removed as it was believed the kernel's memory management layer had solved the underlying conditions but in reality it ended up leading to silent data loss. That Btrfs fixup worker infrastructure is now restored in time for Linux 7.2-rc7 this weekend and the stable v7.2 kernel later this month.

Merged back in Linux 7.0 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS.

It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-system used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare.

Linux's cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface.

The EFS file-system was used for non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and disk partitions on SGI IRIX before IRIX 6.0 switched over to XFS. Inside the Linux kernel has been a read-only EFS file-system driver without a maintainer for 20+ years while for Linux 7.3 it's expected to be removed.

While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs.

The Bcachefs file-system already makes use of the Rust programming language in the user-space tools for this CoW file-system and they have been planning to make use of Rust within the kernel module too. Beginning in the next Bcachefs release, v1.38.7, they are looking at beginning to include Rust code now in their kernel driver.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches.

Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server. There hasn't been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support.

While the new NTFS file-system driver merged for Linux 7.1 and has seen more improvements for Linux 7.2, for now at least the NTFS3 kernel driver continues to be maintained with new fixes and improvements. NTFS3 is the driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel a few years ago back during the pandemic by Paragon Software.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have landed for Linux 7.2.

The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the

In addition to open-source developer Namjae Jeon serving as maintainer for the new NTFS Linux driver, he also continues serving as maintainer to the exFAT file-system for that other Microsoft file-system popular with removable storage media.