In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle.
Microsoft’s exFAT as their file-system choice for USB flash drives, SD cards, and other flash media continues seeing improvements for its Linux driver support. One improvement that stands out with exFAT in Linux 6.18 is to optimize the allocation bitmap loading time. This is the enhancement previously covered on Phoronix one month ago that can lead to a ~16.5x speed-up for loading time. This change is particularly beneficial for large partitions with small cluster sizes.
In addition to that big loading time improvement, exFAT now supports the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls for getting/setting the file-system label, support for changing the discard / zero_size_dir / errors mount options via remount handling, and a few other patches to enhance the code.
More details on these merged exFAT changes for Linux 6.18 via this pull.
