Ted Ts'o at Google has sent out the EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development [1]Linux 6.15 kernel.

While [2]Bcachefs is stabilizing its on-disk format and [3]Btrfs adding real-time Zstd compression , EXT4 is continuing to move along gracefully in its mature state. With Linux 6.15 there isn't too much to get excited about for this incrementally evolving file-system besides noting it's better hardened now against maliciously-fuzzed file-systems. The EXT4 kernel C driver has some additional safeguards in place for maliciously intended file-system modifications.

Ted Ts'o sums up the highlights in the [4]EXT4 pull request as:

"* hardening against maliciously fuzzed file systems

* backwards compatibility for the brief period when we attempted to ignore zero-width characters

* avoid potentially BUG'ing if there is a file system corruption found during the file system unmount

* fix free space reporting by statfs when project quotas are enabled and the free space is less than the remaining project quota

Also improve performance when replaying a journal with a very large number of revoke records (applicable for Lustre volumes)."

That's it for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle on the EXT4 front.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.15

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Bcachefs-Linux-6.15

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.15-Btrfs

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250327164029.GA1423119@mit.edu/