Btrfs-Progs 6.13 was released this weekend as the newest routine update to the user-space utilities for the Btrfs file-system.

Notable to the Btrfs-Progs 6.13 release is adding a compression "--compress" option to the mkfs.btrfs utility for easily managing compression on Btrfs file-systems.

The mkfs.btrfs --compress option allows specifying either "no" as the default without any compression or the zlib / lzo / zstd compression options. Additionally, a compression level can be specified such as "--compress=zlib:9" for maximum Zlib compression.

The mkfs.btrfs --compress option is to be used in conjunction with the "--rootdir" argument for specifying the desired directories for compressing.

This compression option for mkfs.btrfs is the main addition of btrfs-progs 6.13 while there is also some other mkfs output improvements, scrub improvements, and other minor updates and fixes.

The Btrfs programs 6.13 update can be downloaded from [1]GitHub .



[1] https://github.com/kdave/btrfs-progs/releases/tag/v6.13