The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for [1]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.

Introduced back in Linux 6.17 was FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES as a fallocate() flag for efficiently zeroing out a specified file or range. Via NVMe Deallocate or similar SCSI standards can allow for offloading the zeroing out of the file/range for better efficiency and performance over user-space manually zeroing out or pre-initializing a file.

More details on the FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES functionality can be found in the original article on the topic, [2]Linux 6.17 Will Allow Writing Zeroes More Efficiently To SSDs . When merged last year the EXT4 file-system was the first one implementing FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES support while now XFS is ready to go with Linux 7.3.

The rest of the [3]XFS updates for Linux 7.3 are routine bug fixes and code improvements.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.3

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-fallocate-Write-Zero

[3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=cf07e82984895a06a7cbfadee1b13d83805bb41b