1 .. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
3 ==========================================
4 WHAT IS Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS)?
5 ==========================================
7 NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as SSD, eMMC, and SD cards, have
8 been equipped on a variety systems ranging from mobile to server systems. Since
9 they are known to have different characteristics from the conventional rotating
10 disks, a file system, an upper layer to the storage device, should adapt to the
11 changes from the sketch in the design level.
13 F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which
14 is based on Log-structured File System (LFS). The design has been focused on
15 addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering
16 tree and high cleaning overhead.
18 Since a NAND flash memory-based storage device shows different characteristic
19 according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme, namely FTL,
20 F2FS and its tools support various parameters not only for configuring on-disk
21 layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms.
23 The following git tree provides the file system formatting tool (mkfs.f2fs),
24 a consistency checking tool (fsck.f2fs), and a debugging tool (dump.f2fs).
26 - git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jaegeuk/f2fs-tools.git
28 For reporting bugs and sending patches, please use the following mailing list:
30 - linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
32 Background and Design issues
33 ============================
35 Log-structured File System (LFS)
36 --------------------------------
37 "A log-structured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in
38 a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and crash recovery.
39 The log is the only structure on disk; it contains indexing information so that
40 files can be read back from the log efficiently. In order to maintain large free
41 areas on disk for fast writing, we divide the log into segments and use a
42 segment cleaner to compress the live information from heavily fragmented
43 segments." from Rosenblum, M. and Ousterhout, J. K., 1992, "The design and
44 implementation of a log-structured file system", ACM Trans. Computer Systems
47 Wandering Tree Problem
48 ----------------------
49 In LFS, when a file data is updated and written to the end of log, its direct
50 pointer block is updated due to the changed location. Then the indirect pointer
51 block is also updated due to the direct pointer block update. In this manner,
52 the upper index structures such as inode, inode map, and checkpoint block are
53 also updated recursively. This problem is called as wandering tree problem [1],
54 and in order to enhance the performance, it should eliminate or relax the update
55 propagation as much as possible.
57 [1] Bityutskiy, A. 2005. JFFS3 design issues. http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/
61 Since LFS is based on out-of-place writes, it produces so many obsolete blocks
62 scattered across the whole storage. In order to serve new empty log space, it
63 needs to reclaim these obsolete blocks seamlessly to users. This job is called
64 as a cleaning process.
66 The process consists of three operations as follows.
68 1. A victim segment is selected through referencing segment usage table.
69 2. It loads parent index structures of all the data in the victim identified by
70 segment summary blocks.
71 3. It checks the cross-reference between the data and its parent index structure.
72 4. It moves valid data selectively.
74 This cleaning job may cause unexpected long delays, so the most important goal
75 is to hide the latencies to users. And also definitely, it should reduce the
76 amount of valid data to be moved, and move them quickly as well.
83 - Enlarge the random write area for better performance, but provide the high
85 - Align FS data structures to the operational units in FTL as best efforts
87 Wandering Tree Problem
88 ----------------------
89 - Use a term, “node”, that represents inodes as well as various pointer blocks
90 - Introduce Node Address Table (NAT) containing the locations of all the “node”
91 blocks; this will cut off the update propagation.
95 - Support a background cleaning process
96 - Support greedy and cost-benefit algorithms for victim selection policies
97 - Support multi-head logs for static/dynamic hot and cold data separation
98 - Introduce adaptive logging for efficient block allocation
104 ====================== ============================================================
105 background_gc=%s Turn on/off cleaning operations, namely garbage
106 collection, triggered in background when I/O subsystem is
107 idle. If background_gc=on, it will turn on the garbage
108 collection and if background_gc=off, garbage collection
109 will be turned off. If background_gc=sync, it will turn
110 on synchronous garbage collection running in background.
111 Default value for this option is on. So garbage
112 collection is on by default.
113 disable_roll_forward Disable the roll-forward recovery routine
114 norecovery Disable the roll-forward recovery routine, mounted read-
115 only (i.e., -o ro,disable_roll_forward)
116 discard/nodiscard Enable/disable real-time discard in f2fs, if discard is
117 enabled, f2fs will issue discard/TRIM commands when a
119 no_heap Disable heap-style segment allocation which finds free
120 segments for data from the beginning of main area, while
121 for node from the end of main area.
122 nouser_xattr Disable Extended User Attributes. Note: xattr is enabled
123 by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_XATTR is selected.
124 noacl Disable POSIX Access Control List. Note: acl is enabled
125 by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_POSIX_ACL is selected.
126 active_logs=%u Support configuring the number of active logs. In the
127 current design, f2fs supports only 2, 4, and 6 logs.
129 disable_ext_identify Disable the extension list configured by mkfs, so f2fs
130 does not aware of cold files such as media files.
131 inline_xattr Enable the inline xattrs feature.
132 noinline_xattr Disable the inline xattrs feature.
133 inline_xattr_size=%u Support configuring inline xattr size, it depends on
134 flexible inline xattr feature.
135 inline_data Enable the inline data feature: New created small(<~3.4k)
136 files can be written into inode block.
137 inline_dentry Enable the inline dir feature: data in new created
138 directory entries can be written into inode block. The
139 space of inode block which is used to store inline
140 dentries is limited to ~3.4k.
141 noinline_dentry Disable the inline dentry feature.
142 flush_merge Merge concurrent cache_flush commands as much as possible
143 to eliminate redundant command issues. If the underlying
144 device handles the cache_flush command relatively slowly,
145 recommend to enable this option.
146 nobarrier This option can be used if underlying storage guarantees
147 its cached data should be written to the novolatile area.
148 If this option is set, no cache_flush commands are issued
149 but f2fs still guarantees the write ordering of all the
151 fastboot This option is used when a system wants to reduce mount
152 time as much as possible, even though normal performance
154 extent_cache Enable an extent cache based on rb-tree, it can cache
155 as many as extent which map between contiguous logical
156 address and physical address per inode, resulting in
157 increasing the cache hit ratio. Set by default.
158 noextent_cache Disable an extent cache based on rb-tree explicitly, see
159 the above extent_cache mount option.
160 noinline_data Disable the inline data feature, inline data feature is
162 data_flush Enable data flushing before checkpoint in order to
163 persist data of regular and symlink.
164 reserve_root=%d Support configuring reserved space which is used for
165 allocation from a privileged user with specified uid or
166 gid, unit: 4KB, the default limit is 0.2% of user blocks.
167 resuid=%d The user ID which may use the reserved blocks.
168 resgid=%d The group ID which may use the reserved blocks.
169 fault_injection=%d Enable fault injection in all supported types with
170 specified injection rate.
171 fault_type=%d Support configuring fault injection type, should be
172 enabled with fault_injection option, fault type value
173 is shown below, it supports single or combined type.
175 =================== ===========
177 =================== ===========
178 FAULT_KMALLOC 0x000000001
179 FAULT_KVMALLOC 0x000000002
180 FAULT_PAGE_ALLOC 0x000000004
181 FAULT_PAGE_GET 0x000000008
182 FAULT_ALLOC_BIO 0x000000010
183 FAULT_ALLOC_NID 0x000000020
184 FAULT_ORPHAN 0x000000040
185 FAULT_BLOCK 0x000000080
186 FAULT_DIR_DEPTH 0x000000100
187 FAULT_EVICT_INODE 0x000000200
188 FAULT_TRUNCATE 0x000000400
189 FAULT_READ_IO 0x000000800
190 FAULT_CHECKPOINT 0x000001000
191 FAULT_DISCARD 0x000002000
192 FAULT_WRITE_IO 0x000004000
193 =================== ===========
194 mode=%s Control block allocation mode which supports "adaptive"
195 and "lfs". In "lfs" mode, there should be no random
196 writes towards main area.
197 io_bits=%u Set the bit size of write IO requests. It should be set
199 usrquota Enable plain user disk quota accounting.
200 grpquota Enable plain group disk quota accounting.
201 prjquota Enable plain project quota accounting.
202 usrjquota=<file> Appoint specified file and type during mount, so that quota
203 grpjquota=<file> information can be properly updated during recovery flow,
204 prjjquota=<file> <quota file>: must be in root directory;
205 jqfmt=<quota type> <quota type>: [vfsold,vfsv0,vfsv1].
206 offusrjquota Turn off user journelled quota.
207 offgrpjquota Turn off group journelled quota.
208 offprjjquota Turn off project journelled quota.
209 quota Enable plain user disk quota accounting.
210 noquota Disable all plain disk quota option.
211 whint_mode=%s Control which write hints are passed down to block
212 layer. This supports "off", "user-based", and
213 "fs-based". In "off" mode (default), f2fs does not pass
214 down hints. In "user-based" mode, f2fs tries to pass
215 down hints given by users. And in "fs-based" mode, f2fs
216 passes down hints with its policy.
217 alloc_mode=%s Adjust block allocation policy, which supports "reuse"
219 fsync_mode=%s Control the policy of fsync. Currently supports "posix",
220 "strict", and "nobarrier". In "posix" mode, which is
221 default, fsync will follow POSIX semantics and does a
222 light operation to improve the filesystem performance.
223 In "strict" mode, fsync will be heavy and behaves in line
224 with xfs, ext4 and btrfs, where xfstest generic/342 will
225 pass, but the performance will regress. "nobarrier" is
226 based on "posix", but doesn't issue flush command for
227 non-atomic files likewise "nobarrier" mount option.
228 test_dummy_encryption
229 test_dummy_encryption=%s
230 Enable dummy encryption, which provides a fake fscrypt
231 context. The fake fscrypt context is used by xfstests.
232 The argument may be either "v1" or "v2", in order to
233 select the corresponding fscrypt policy version.
234 checkpoint=%s[:%u[%]] Set to "disable" to turn off checkpointing. Set to "enable"
235 to reenable checkpointing. Is enabled by default. While
236 disabled, any unmounting or unexpected shutdowns will cause
237 the filesystem contents to appear as they did when the
238 filesystem was mounted with that option.
239 While mounting with checkpoint=disabled, the filesystem must
240 run garbage collection to ensure that all available space can
241 be used. If this takes too much time, the mount may return
242 EAGAIN. You may optionally add a value to indicate how much
243 of the disk you would be willing to temporarily give up to
244 avoid additional garbage collection. This can be given as a
245 number of blocks, or as a percent. For instance, mounting
246 with checkpoint=disable:100% would always succeed, but it may
247 hide up to all remaining free space. The actual space that
248 would be unusable can be viewed at /sys/fs/f2fs/<disk>/unusable
249 This space is reclaimed once checkpoint=enable.
250 compress_algorithm=%s Control compress algorithm, currently f2fs supports "lzo",
251 "lz4" and "zstd" algorithm.
252 compress_log_size=%u Support configuring compress cluster size, the size will
253 be 4KB * (1 << %u), 16KB is minimum size, also it's
255 compress_extension=%s Support adding specified extension, so that f2fs can enable
256 compression on those corresponding files, e.g. if all files
257 with '.ext' has high compression rate, we can set the '.ext'
258 on compression extension list and enable compression on
259 these file by default rather than to enable it via ioctl.
260 For other files, we can still enable compression via ioctl.
261 ====================== ============================================================
266 /sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/ contains information about all the partitions mounted as
267 f2fs. Each file shows the whole f2fs information.
269 /sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/status includes:
271 - major file system information managed by f2fs currently
272 - average SIT information about whole segments
273 - current memory footprint consumed by f2fs.
278 Information about mounted f2fs file systems can be found in
279 /sys/fs/f2fs. Each mounted filesystem will have a directory in
280 /sys/fs/f2fs based on its device name (i.e., /sys/fs/f2fs/sda).
281 The files in each per-device directory are shown in table below.
283 Files in /sys/fs/f2fs/<devname>
284 (see also Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-fs-f2fs)
289 1. Download userland tools and compile them.
291 2. Skip, if f2fs was compiled statically inside kernel.
292 Otherwise, insert the f2fs.ko module::
296 3. Create a directory trying to mount::
300 4. Format the block device, and then mount as f2fs::
302 # mkfs.f2fs -l label /dev/block_device
303 # mount -t f2fs /dev/block_device /mnt/f2fs
307 The mkfs.f2fs is for the use of formatting a partition as the f2fs filesystem,
308 which builds a basic on-disk layout.
310 The options consist of:
312 =============== ===========================================================
313 ``-l [label]`` Give a volume label, up to 512 unicode name.
314 ``-a [0 or 1]`` Split start location of each area for heap-based allocation.
316 1 is set by default, which performs this.
317 ``-o [int]`` Set overprovision ratio in percent over volume size.
320 ``-s [int]`` Set the number of segments per section.
323 ``-z [int]`` Set the number of sections per zone.
326 ``-e [str]`` Set basic extension list. e.g. "mp3,gif,mov"
327 ``-t [0 or 1]`` Disable discard command or not.
329 1 is set by default, which conducts discard.
330 =============== ===========================================================
334 The fsck.f2fs is a tool to check the consistency of an f2fs-formatted
335 partition, which examines whether the filesystem metadata and user-made data
336 are cross-referenced correctly or not.
337 Note that, initial version of the tool does not fix any inconsistency.
339 The options consist of::
341 -d debug level [default:0]
345 The dump.f2fs shows the information of specific inode and dumps SSA and SIT to
346 file. Each file is dump_ssa and dump_sit.
348 The dump.f2fs is used to debug on-disk data structures of the f2fs filesystem.
349 It shows on-disk inode information recognized by a given inode number, and is
350 able to dump all the SSA and SIT entries into predefined files, ./dump_ssa and
351 ./dump_sit respectively.
353 The options consist of::
355 -d debug level [default:0]
357 -s [SIT dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
358 -a [SSA dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
362 # dump.f2fs -i [ino] /dev/sdx
363 # dump.f2fs -s 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SIT dump)
364 # dump.f2fs -a 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SSA dump)
372 F2FS divides the whole volume into a number of segments, each of which is fixed
373 to 2MB in size. A section is composed of consecutive segments, and a zone
374 consists of a set of sections. By default, section and zone sizes are set to one
375 segment size identically, but users can easily modify the sizes by mkfs.
377 F2FS splits the entire volume into six areas, and all the areas except superblock
378 consists of multiple segments as described below::
380 align with the zone size <-|
381 |-> align with the segment size
382 _________________________________________________________________________
383 | | | Segment | Node | Segment | |
384 | Superblock | Checkpoint | Info. | Address | Summary | Main |
385 | (SB) | (CP) | Table (SIT) | Table (NAT) | Area (SSA) | |
386 |____________|_____2______|______N______|______N______|______N_____|__N___|
390 ._________________________________________.
391 |_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|
400 It is located at the beginning of the partition, and there exist two copies
401 to avoid file system crash. It contains basic partition information and some
402 default parameters of f2fs.
405 It contains file system information, bitmaps for valid NAT/SIT sets, orphan
406 inode lists, and summary entries of current active segments.
408 - Segment Information Table (SIT)
409 It contains segment information such as valid block count and bitmap for the
410 validity of all the blocks.
412 - Node Address Table (NAT)
413 It is composed of a block address table for all the node blocks stored in
416 - Segment Summary Area (SSA)
417 It contains summary entries which contains the owner information of all the
418 data and node blocks stored in Main area.
421 It contains file and directory data including their indices.
423 In order to avoid misalignment between file system and flash-based storage, F2FS
424 aligns the start block address of CP with the segment size. Also, it aligns the
425 start block address of Main area with the zone size by reserving some segments
428 Reference the following survey for additional technical details.
429 https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Kernel/Projects/FlashCardSurvey
431 File System Metadata Structure
432 ------------------------------
434 F2FS adopts the checkpointing scheme to maintain file system consistency. At
435 mount time, F2FS first tries to find the last valid checkpoint data by scanning
436 CP area. In order to reduce the scanning time, F2FS uses only two copies of CP.
437 One of them always indicates the last valid data, which is called as shadow copy
438 mechanism. In addition to CP, NAT and SIT also adopt the shadow copy mechanism.
440 For file system consistency, each CP points to which NAT and SIT copies are
441 valid, as shown as below::
443 +--------+----------+---------+
445 +--------+----------+---------+
449 +-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
450 | CP #0 | CP #1 | SIT #0 | SIT #1 | NAT #0 | NAT #1 |
451 +-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
454 `----------------------------------------'
459 The key data structure to manage the data locations is a "node". Similar to
460 traditional file structures, F2FS has three types of node: inode, direct node,
461 indirect node. F2FS assigns 4KB to an inode block which contains 923 data block
462 indices, two direct node pointers, two indirect node pointers, and one double
463 indirect node pointer as described below. One direct node block contains 1018
464 data blocks, and one indirect node block contains also 1018 node blocks. Thus,
465 one inode block (i.e., a file) covers::
467 4KB * (923 + 2 * 1018 + 2 * 1018 * 1018 + 1018 * 1018 * 1018) := 3.94TB.
474 | `- direct node (1018)
476 `- double indirect node (1)
477 `- indirect node (1018)
478 `- direct node (1018)
481 Note that, all the node blocks are mapped by NAT which means the location of
482 each node is translated by the NAT table. In the consideration of the wandering
483 tree problem, F2FS is able to cut off the propagation of node updates caused by
489 A directory entry occupies 11 bytes, which consists of the following attributes.
491 - hash hash value of the file name
493 - len the length of file name
494 - type file type such as directory, symlink, etc
496 A dentry block consists of 214 dentry slots and file names. Therein a bitmap is
497 used to represent whether each dentry is valid or not. A dentry block occupies
498 4KB with the following composition.
502 Dentry Block(4 K) = bitmap (27 bytes) + reserved (3 bytes) +
503 dentries(11 * 214 bytes) + file name (8 * 214 bytes)
506 +--------------------------------+
507 |dentry block 1 | dentry block 2 |
508 +--------------------------------+
511 . [Dentry Block Structure: 4KB] .
512 +--------+----------+----------+------------+
513 | bitmap | reserved | dentries | file names |
514 +--------+----------+----------+------------+
515 [Dentry Block: 4KB] . .
518 +------+------+-----+------+
519 | hash | ino | len | type |
520 +------+------+-----+------+
521 [Dentry Structure: 11 bytes]
523 F2FS implements multi-level hash tables for directory structure. Each level has
524 a hash table with dedicated number of hash buckets as shown below. Note that
525 "A(2B)" means a bucket includes 2 data blocks.
529 ----------------------
532 N : MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH
533 ----------------------
537 level #1 | A(2B) - A(2B)
539 level #2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B)
541 level #N/2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - ... - A(2B)
543 level #N | A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - ... - A(4B)
545 The number of blocks and buckets are determined by::
547 ,- 2, if n < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
548 # of blocks in level #n = |
551 ,- 2^(n + dir_level),
552 | if n + dir_level < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
553 # of buckets in level #n = |
554 `- 2^((MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2) - 1),
557 When F2FS finds a file name in a directory, at first a hash value of the file
558 name is calculated. Then, F2FS scans the hash table in level #0 to find the
559 dentry consisting of the file name and its inode number. If not found, F2FS
560 scans the next hash table in level #1. In this way, F2FS scans hash tables in
561 each levels incrementally from 1 to N. In each levels F2FS needs to scan only
562 one bucket determined by the following equation, which shows O(log(# of files))
565 bucket number to scan in level #n = (hash value) % (# of buckets in level #n)
567 In the case of file creation, F2FS finds empty consecutive slots that cover the
568 file name. F2FS searches the empty slots in the hash tables of whole levels from
569 1 to N in the same way as the lookup operation.
571 The following figure shows an example of two cases holding children::
573 --------------> Dir <--------------
577 child - child [hole] - child
579 child - child - child [hole] - [hole] - child
582 Number of children = 6, Number of children = 3,
583 File size = 7 File size = 7
585 Default Block Allocation
586 ------------------------
588 At runtime, F2FS manages six active logs inside "Main" area: Hot/Warm/Cold node
589 and Hot/Warm/Cold data.
591 - Hot node contains direct node blocks of directories.
592 - Warm node contains direct node blocks except hot node blocks.
593 - Cold node contains indirect node blocks
594 - Hot data contains dentry blocks
595 - Warm data contains data blocks except hot and cold data blocks
596 - Cold data contains multimedia data or migrated data blocks
598 LFS has two schemes for free space management: threaded log and copy-and-compac-
599 tion. The copy-and-compaction scheme which is known as cleaning, is well-suited
600 for devices showing very good sequential write performance, since free segments
601 are served all the time for writing new data. However, it suffers from cleaning
602 overhead under high utilization. Contrarily, the threaded log scheme suffers
603 from random writes, but no cleaning process is needed. F2FS adopts a hybrid
604 scheme where the copy-and-compaction scheme is adopted by default, but the
605 policy is dynamically changed to the threaded log scheme according to the file
608 In order to align F2FS with underlying flash-based storage, F2FS allocates a
609 segment in a unit of section. F2FS expects that the section size would be the
610 same as the unit size of garbage collection in FTL. Furthermore, with respect
611 to the mapping granularity in FTL, F2FS allocates each section of the active
612 logs from different zones as much as possible, since FTL can write the data in
613 the active logs into one allocation unit according to its mapping granularity.
618 F2FS does cleaning both on demand and in the background. On-demand cleaning is
619 triggered when there are not enough free segments to serve VFS calls. Background
620 cleaner is operated by a kernel thread, and triggers the cleaning job when the
623 F2FS supports two victim selection policies: greedy and cost-benefit algorithms.
624 In the greedy algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment having the smallest number
625 of valid blocks. In the cost-benefit algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment
626 according to the segment age and the number of valid blocks in order to address
627 log block thrashing problem in the greedy algorithm. F2FS adopts the greedy
628 algorithm for on-demand cleaner, while background cleaner adopts cost-benefit
631 In order to identify whether the data in the victim segment are valid or not,
632 F2FS manages a bitmap. Each bit represents the validity of a block, and the
633 bitmap is composed of a bit stream covering whole blocks in main area.
638 1) whint_mode=off. F2FS only passes down WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET.
640 2) whint_mode=user-based. F2FS tries to pass down hints given by
643 ===================== ======================== ===================
645 ===================== ======================== ===================
646 META WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
650 ioctl(COLD) COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
654 WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
655 WRITE_LIFE_SHORT HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
656 WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
658 WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM " "
662 WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
663 WRITE_LIFE_SHORT HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
664 WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
665 WRITE_LIFE_NONE " WRITE_LIFE_NONE
666 WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM " WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM
667 WRITE_LIFE_LONG " WRITE_LIFE_LONG
668 ===================== ======================== ===================
670 3) whint_mode=fs-based. F2FS passes down hints with its policy.
672 ===================== ======================== ===================
674 ===================== ======================== ===================
675 META WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM;
676 HOT_NODE WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
678 COLD_NODE WRITE_LIFE_NONE
679 ioctl(COLD) COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
683 WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
684 WRITE_LIFE_SHORT HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
685 WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_LONG
687 WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM " "
691 WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
692 WRITE_LIFE_SHORT HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
693 WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
694 WRITE_LIFE_NONE " WRITE_LIFE_NONE
695 WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM " WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM
696 WRITE_LIFE_LONG " WRITE_LIFE_LONG
697 ===================== ======================== ===================
702 The default policy follows the below posix rule.
704 Allocating disk space
705 The default operation (i.e., mode is zero) of fallocate() allocates
706 the disk space within the range specified by offset and len. The
707 file size (as reported by stat(2)) will be changed if offset+len is
708 greater than the file size. Any subregion within the range specified
709 by offset and len that did not contain data before the call will be
710 initialized to zero. This default behavior closely resembles the
711 behavior of the posix_fallocate(3) library function, and is intended
712 as a method of optimally implementing that function.
714 However, once F2FS receives ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_SET_PIN_FILE) in prior to
715 fallocate(fd, DEFAULT_MODE), it allocates on-disk blocks addressess having
716 zero or random data, which is useful to the below scenario where:
719 2. ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_SET_PIN_FILE)
720 3. fallocate(fd, 0, 0, size)
721 4. address = fibmap(fd, offset)
723 6. write(blkdev, address)
725 Compression implementation
726 --------------------------
728 - New term named cluster is defined as basic unit of compression, file can
729 be divided into multiple clusters logically. One cluster includes 4 << n
730 (n >= 0) logical pages, compression size is also cluster size, each of
731 cluster can be compressed or not.
733 - In cluster metadata layout, one special block address is used to indicate
734 cluster is compressed one or normal one, for compressed cluster, following
735 metadata maps cluster to [1, 4 << n - 1] physical blocks, in where f2fs
736 stores data including compress header and compressed data.
738 - In order to eliminate write amplification during overwrite, F2FS only
739 support compression on write-once file, data can be compressed only when
740 all logical blocks in file are valid and cluster compress ratio is lower
741 than specified threshold.
743 - To enable compression on regular inode, there are three ways:
746 * chattr +c dir; touch dir/file
747 * mount w/ -o compress_extension=ext; touch file.ext
749 Compress metadata layout::
752 +-----------------------------------------------+
753 | cluster 1 | cluster 2 | ......... | cluster N |
754 +-----------------------------------------------+
757 . Compressed Cluster . . Normal Cluster .
758 +----------+---------+---------+---------+ +---------+---------+---------+---------+
759 |compr flag| block 1 | block 2 | block 3 | | block 1 | block 2 | block 3 | block 4 |
760 +----------+---------+---------+---------+ +---------+---------+---------+---------+
764 +-------------+-------------+----------+----------------------------+
765 | data length | data chksum | reserved | compressed data |
766 +-------------+-------------+----------+----------------------------+