The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see performance improvements with the release of Linux 7.3, thanks to updates enabling parallel multi-device flushes. Samsung engineer Yonggil Song spearheaded the changes, which address inefficiencies in how F2FS handles data synchronization across multiple storage devices.
Previously, F2FS flushed data to multiple devices sequentially. The update allows the driver to issue these flushes in parallel, leveraging the independent flush queues already present in each device. This change is designed to reduce overall flush times by limiting the process to the speed of the slowest device, rather than summing the time taken by all devices.
Beyond the parallel flushing, Linux 7.3 also brings reductions to the memory overhead of inode management within F2FS. The file system now supports dynamic reserve/release for device aliasing, and the `f2fs_write_end_io()` function can now run asynchronously. Testing on an Arm Cortex-A520 device showed asynchronous operation reduced the time spent on this function from 10 milliseconds to 150 microseconds. The Linux 7.3 release also includes numerous bug fixes for F2FS, detailed in the associated pull request.
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