F2FS (Flash-Friendly File-System) Shows Hope (3.8 kernel)

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Published on February 18, 2013 - Written by Michael Larabel

Being released soon is the Linux 3.8 kernel and one of its many new features is the introduction of the F2FS file-system. The "Flash-Friendly File-System" was developed by Samsung and is showing promise as a new Linux file-system designed around the characteristics of flash-based storage devices. In this article are the first benchmarks of F2FS compared to Btrfs, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, JFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

F2FS is a log-structured file-system that was originally developed by Samsung (that article has more details on the F2FS design principles) in October of last year and then merged into Linux 3.8. The initial performance results relayed by the developers were impressive for this open-source file-system that's designed for optimal use on solid-state drives, eMMC, SD cards, and other (NAND-based) flash memory storage devices.

Samsung obviously designed F2FS with its many Android-based mobile devices in mind but F2FS may end up becoming quite relevant to servers too. The F2FS file-system's on-disk layout is configurable as is the allocation and cleaning algorithms along with other parameters that can be tuned for optimizing the Linux file-system to a given flash device.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_f2fs_benchmarks&num=1

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Posted by Michael Larabel on February 18, 2013

Linux 3.8 Kernel Officially Released

The Linux 3.8 kernel was released on Monday afternoon by Linus Torvalds. This is a very exciting kernel update.

Since the release of Linux 3.7 in early December there have been many changes presented for Linux 3.8, which are covered in the Phoronix 3.8 feature overview article.

Among the highlights are the introduction of the new

F2FS file-system

EXT4 inline data support

true CPU hot-plug support

Intel i386 support removal

new processor enablement

Radeon driver performance improvements

Intel DRM work, and a whole lot more.

3.8 Kernel Feature Overview is here

For those interested in benchmarks of Linux 3.8, among the in-house Phoronix tests to date include F2FS file-system benchmarks, EXT4 and Btrfs on Linux 3.8, Intel Ivy Bridge HD 4000 benchmarks, a Nouveau 5-way GPU comparison, NVIDIA GeForce 600 Linux performance, faster AMD Radeon graphics, and other 3.8 benchmarks.

There's still a Btrfs fix that wasn't merged for Linux 3.8 but it looks like that will be staved off until a stable point release.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMwNTQ

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Posted by Michael Larabel on February 25, 2013

Samsung Brings Fixes To F2FS In Linux 3.9 Kernel

Samsung developers have worked up a set of improvements to the new F2FS file-system for the Linux kernel. The F2FS work in Linux 3.9 mostly comes down to fixing issues with the Flash-Friendly File-System and implementing some new functionality.

The work for the Flash-Friendly File-System in the Linux 3.9 kernel includes fixes to store device file information correctly, fixing -EIO handling, allocates blocks with global locks, fixes wrong calculation of the SSR cost, supports freeze/unfreeze_fs, enhances the f2fs_gc slow, and supports 32-bit binary execution on 64-bit kernels.

These improvements come after Samsung's F2FS was first introduced in Linux 3.8. So far on Phoronix there have been F2FS benchmarks on an SSD compared to EXT4 and Btrfs and other file-systems as well as SDHC F2FS benchmarks. Still coming up are benchmarks of F2FS from a USB flash drive. On Sunday was also a Linux file-system comparison with NILFS2.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxMTU

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Posted by Michael Larabel on March 03, 2013

F2FS Benchmarks From USB Flash Storage

Up to this point on Phoronix there have been F2FS benchmarks -- the new Linux file-system designed by Samsung as the Flash-Friendly File-System -- in the context of solid-state storage benchmarking against various other Linux file-systems and also tests done from SDHC storage. In this article are our first tests when benchmarking F2FS from a USB 3.0 flash drive and comparing the performance to other open-source Linux file-systems

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_f2fs_usb3&num=1

[Just17]

It continues to look promising .......  thanks for the update 

[menotu]

It continues to look promising .......  thanks for the update  

Its my pleasure Just17

A few more tests this time against Microsoft's exFAT file system
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Posted by Michael Larabel on F March 03, 2013

F2FS Results Mixed Against Microsoft's exFAT On Linux

(From Page 1)

In the benchmarking that has happened since the release of the Linux 3.8 kernel, there's been many tests that occurred of Samsung's Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). With that testing has also come many requests to compare the performance of this file-system designed for flash storage devices to Microsoft's exFAT file-system as well as NTFS. In this article are those benchmark results.

Up to this point the F2FS file-system benchmarks on Phoronix have shown really great results against Btrfs and EXT4 from a high-end Intel SSD, positive SDHC storage benchmark results, and better performance than NILFS2. The new file-system was also proven to run really well on USB flash drives. With those tests, the comparison was done against other existing Linux kernel file-systems like EXT4, Btrfs, and even older competition like ReiserFS and EXT3 for some of the articles.

(and from Page 4)

When it came to running exFAT on PostMark, its performance was about three times faster than F2FS.

These results are fairly surprising... For some disk workloads, the FUSE-based Microsoft exFAT file-system was faster than the in-kernel F2FS file-system. Earlier Phoronix tests have shown that F2FS from flash storage is already generally competitive with the popular Btrfs and EXT4 Linux file-systems. Seeing a user-space implementation of the Microsoft file-system outperforming the in-kernel "Flash-Friendly File-System" came as a shock. Then again, Tuxera claimed NTFS is the fastest file-system for Linux.

In the end it will be interesting to see how the F2FS situation plays out. While Samsung is presently leading the development of this open-source file-system, it stands slim chances of seeing deployments on consumer electronic devices from the company unless F2FS were also to be ported and widely available for Windows and OS X. Given the turnaround time there and that F2FS will likely need a few years to prove itself as a safe and reliable file-system, don't look for F2FS (or any other open-source file-system) to unseat Microsoft's exFAT in the immediate future.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_f2fs_exfat&num=1

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By Jaegeuk Kim - 2013-05-08 =- Samsung

Merge tag 'f2fs-for-v3.10'

This patch-set includes the following major enhancement patches.

 - Introduce a new gloabl lock scheme.
- Add tracepoints on several major functions.
- Fix the overall cleaning process focused on victim selection.
- Apply the block plugging to merge IOs as much as possible
- Enhance management of free nids and its list.
- Enhance the readahead mode for node pages.
- Address several cretical deadlock conditions.
- Reduce lock_page calls.

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=942d33da999b86821c9aee9615fcb81207ee04c7