While Bcachefs and Btrfs capture much of the Linux file-system spotlight these days when it comes to exciting developments, there is no shortage of alternative open-source file-systems. One that's been around for a long time but not seeing as much adoption or major feature developments but still worthy of a shout-out is the log-structured [1]NILFS2 file-system. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle it looks like it will land a fresh round of fixes and a few new ioctls being enabled.

NILFS2 is a log-structured file-system that has been in the mainline kernel for more than a decade and known to work particularly well for latency-sensitive environments and/or systems with a plethora of small files. All these years later though it still lacks a fsck utility nor POSIX ACLs and some other features like extended attributes and quotas. In any event, once in a while it sees some fresh patches in the mainline kernel beyond just the small fixes.

Being queued up as part of Andrew Morton's [2]MM patches queue is a larger than usual assortment of fixes and new features. Given the timing of these patches being queued into Morton's MM branches, it's likely this new NILFS2 work will be found in the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window.

New ioctls being wired up for NILFS2 include FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL, FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL, FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH, and FS_IOC_GETUUID. On the fixes side are some error handling improvements, fixing state management in the error path, and a variety of other fixes.

These latest improvements come from Ryusuke Konishi, a founder of the NILFS file-system. Great seeing more NILFS2 improvements continuing to be prepped for the mainline kernel.

Those unfamiliar with NILFS2 or not having heard of it in some years can learn more via the [3]Kernel.org documentation .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/NILFS2

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm.git/log/?h=mm-everything&qt=grep&q=NILFS2

[3] https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/nilfs2.html