Samsung contributes F2FS NAND filesystem to Linux

Samsung has contributed patches to Linux for the F2FS filesystem. F2FS, short for "Flash-Friendly File System", is designed for NAND flash-memory-based devices such as SSD, eMMC and SD cards which have different storage characteristics from hard disks and other rotating media. Implemented as a log structured filesystem, F2FS includes capabilities such as detecting the internal geometry or flash memory management scheme and adjusting its parameters for configuring on-disk layout and selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms.

The patches for F2FS, submitted by Jaegeuk Kim of Samsung, include documentation, headers, and just under thirteen thousand lines of code. As of writing, there have been no comments on the submission from kernel developers and it is unclear what chance F2FS has of being accepted into the kernel.

In August another filesystem for removable storage, LanyFS, was submitted to the kernel, but that did not apparently gain traction or get merged with the Linux kernel. But in the discussion that followed, Arnd Bergmann mentioned that there would be "patches very soon for a new file system from a major flash vendor" and that although he hadn't seen the patches, the design was "similar to a prototype that was done as a thesis I supervised" (proposal, final thesis). It is, given the timing and that the F2FS patches come from Samsung, quite likely that the new filesystem is related to this work.

(djwm)