Contents

  1. Things you need to know
  2. Usage
  3. See also

Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS) is a file system for GNU Linux optimized for Flash storage. It was originally introduced in kernel v3.8, on 2012-12-20. F2FS is popular on portable devices such as smartphones and tablets and uncommon on desktops and servers. For more information about it, follow the links in the See Also section.

Things you need to know

F2FS is a log-structured file system designed to accommodate the characteristics of storage devices that use NAND flash memory, like Secure Digital (SD) and eMMC drives. It supports:

Usage

Enabling compression

To create a compressed file system, f2fs-tools at version >= 1.14.0-1 is required. Note that compression, by default, does not reduce the number of blocks reserved for a file, and file system space is consumed at the same rate as if compression was disabled for compressed files. Rather than allowing storage of additional data, as inline compression permits on other file systems, F2FS uses compression to reduce the amount of writes, thus extending disk life. Kernels as of 5.10 support ioctl(F2FS_IOC_RELEASE_COMPRESS_BLOCKS) which marks a compressed file as immutable and releases the unused, reserved blocks. See F2FS Compression implementation notes in the Kernel's documentation. 

   1 dev=/dev/CHANGEME
   2 mnt=/mnt/CHANGEME
   3 # Enable compression on FS creation
   4 sudo mkfs.f2fs -f -O extra_attr,compression $dev
   5 # (or enable encryption and compression)
   6 # sudo mkfs.f2fs -f -O encrypt,extra_attr,compression $dev
   7 
   8 # Also at mount time
   9 sudo mount -o compress_algorithm=zstd $dev $mnt
  10 
  11 ## Compression demo ##
  12 # create a directory and enable compression on it
  13 sudo mkdir $mnt/comp
  14 sudo chattr -R -V +c $mnt/comp
  15 
  16 # Write a compression-friendly file
  17 sudo cp /etc/dictionaries-common/words $mnt/comp
  18 # du shows the uncompressed size
  19 du -h $mnt/comp/words
  20 # notice: df might be misleading
  21 # Show F2FS status:
  22 sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/status

See also

CategoryKernel | ?CategoryFileSystem | CategorySystemAdministration