The merged EXT4 changes for Linux 6.19 bring some of the most prominent feature changes in recent times for this mature and widely-used Linux file-system.
It’s not too often seeing multiple new EXT4 features land for a single kernel merge window, but that’s the case this round with Linux 6.19. First up, EXT4 has optimized its online defragmentation process by leveraging folios rather than individual buffer heads. Secondly, there is now support for file-systems with a block size greater than the page size. This follows other file-systems also recently adapting to support block sizes larger than the kernel page size, such as the infrastructure in Linux 6.15 and then used by Btrfs and friends already. EXT4 is seeing some nice performance results with the large block size support.
EXT4 also brings a performance improvement to Linux 6.19 by enabling caching when an inode does not have a POSIX ACL.
Plus EXT4 also brings some error code improvements, casefolding and encryption flag documentation, and other enhancements.
More details on this heavy-hitting set of EXT4 changes merged for Linux 6.19 via this pull request.
