.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
=================================
Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS)
=================================
Overview
========
NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as SSD, eMMC, and SD cards, have
been equipped on a variety systems ranging from mobile to server systems. Since
they are known to have different characteristics from the conventional rotating
disks, a file system, an upper layer to the storage device, should adapt to the
changes from the sketch in the design level.
F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which
is based on Log-structured File System (LFS). The design has been focused on
addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering
tree and high cleaning overhead.
Since a NAND flash memory-based storage device shows different characteristic
according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme, namely FTL,
F2FS and its tools support various parameters not only for configuring on-disk
layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms.
The following git tree provides the file system formatting tool (mkfs.f2fs),
a consistency checking tool (fsck.f2fs), and a debugging tool (dump.f2fs).
- git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jaegeuk/f2fs-tools.git
For sending patches, please use the following mailing list:
- linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
For reporting bugs, please use the following f2fs bug tracker link:
- https://bugzilla.kernel.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=File%20System&component=f2fs
Background and Design issues
============================
Log-structured File System (LFS)
--------------------------------
"A log-structured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in
a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and crash recovery.
The log is the only structure on disk; it contains indexing information so that
files can be read back from the log efficiently. In order to maintain large free
areas on disk for fast writing, we divide the log into segments and use a
segment cleaner to compress the live information from heavily fragmented
segments." from Rosenblum, M. and Ousterhout, J. K., 1992, "The design and
implementation of a log-structured file system", ACM Trans. Computer Systems
10, 1, 26–52.
Wandering Tree Problem
----------------------
In LFS, when a file data is updated and written to the end of log, its direct
pointer block is updated due to the changed location. Then the indirect pointer
block is also updated due to the direct pointer block update. In this manner,
the upper index structures such as inode, inode map, and checkpoint block are
also updated recursively. This problem is called as wandering tree problem [1],
and in order to enhance the performance, it should eliminate or relax the update
propagation as much as possible.
[1] Bityutskiy, A. 2005. JFFS3 design issues. http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/
Cleaning Overhead
-----------------
Since LFS is based on out-of-place writes, it produces so many obsolete blocks
scattered across the whole storage. In order to serve new empty log space, it
needs to reclaim these obsolete blocks seamlessly to users. This job is called
as a cleaning process.
The process consists of three operations as follows.
1. A victim segment is selected through referencing segment usage table.
2. It loads parent index structures of all the data in the victim identified by
segment summary blocks.
3. It checks the cross-reference between the data and its parent index structure.
4. It moves valid data selectively.
This cleaning job may cause unexpected long delays, so the most important goal
is to hide the latencies to users. And also definitely, it should reduce the
amount of valid data to be moved, and move them quickly as well.
Key Features
============
Flash Awareness
---------------
- Enlarge the random write area for better performance, but provide the high
spatial locality
- Align FS data structures to the operational units in FTL as best efforts
Wandering Tree Problem
----------------------
- Use a term, “node”, that represents inodes as well as various pointer blocks
- Introduce Node Address Table (NAT) containing the locations of all the “node”
blocks; this will cut off the update propagation.
Cleaning Overhead
-----------------
- Support a background cleaning process
- Support greedy and cost-benefit algorithms for victim selection policies
- Support multi-head logs for static/dynamic hot and cold data separation
- Introduce adaptive logging for efficient block allocation
Mount Options
=============
======================== ============================================================
background_gc=%s Turn on/off cleaning operations, namely garbage
collection, triggered in background when I/O subsystem is
idle. If background_gc=on, it will turn on the garbage
collection and if background_gc=off, garbage collection
will be turned off. If background_gc=sync, it will turn
on synchronous garbage collection running in background.
Default value for this option is on. So garbage
collection is on by default.
gc_merge When background_gc is on, this option can be enabled to
let background GC thread to handle foreground GC requests,
it can eliminate the sluggish issue caused by slow foreground
GC operation when GC is triggered from a process with limited
I/O and CPU resources.
nogc_merge Disable GC merge feature.
disable_roll_forward Disable the roll-forward recovery routine
norecovery Disable the roll-forward recovery routine, mounted read-
only (i.e., -o ro,disable_roll_forward)
discard/nodiscard Enable/disable real-time discard in f2fs, if discard is
enabled, f2fs will issue discard/TRIM commands when a
segment is cleaned.
heap/no_heap Deprecated.
nouser_xattr Disable Extended User Attributes. Note: xattr is enabled
by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_XATTR is selected.
noacl Disable POSIX Access Control List. Note: acl is enabled
by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_POSIX_ACL is selected.
active_logs=%u Support configuring the number of active logs. In the
current design, f2fs supports only 2, 4, and 6 logs.
Default number is 6.
When the underlying block device exposes write
streams, the default active_logs=6 configuration
maps hot, warm, and cold DATA writes to streams 1,
2, and 3, respectively. If only one or two write
streams are available, f2fs falls back to mapping
all DATA writes to stream 1 or mapping hot/warm
to stream 1 and cold to stream 2. If no write
streams are exposed, f2fs leaves the stream
unset.
disable_ext_identify Disable the extension list configured by mkfs, so f2fs
is not aware of cold files such as media files.
inline_xattr Enable the inline xattrs feature.
noinline_xattr Disable the inline xattrs feature.
inline_xattr_size=%u Support configuring inline xattr size, it depends on
flexible inline xattr feature.
inline_data Enable the inline data feature: Newly created small (<~3.4k)
files can be written into inode block.
inline_dentry Enable the inline dir feature: data in newly created
directory entries can be written into inode block. The
space of inode block which is used to store inline
dentries is limited to ~3.4k.
noinline_dentry Disable the inline dentry feature.
flush_merge Merge concurrent cache_flush commands as much as possible
to eliminate redundant command issues. If the underlying
device handles the cache_flush command relatively slowly,
recommend to enable this option.
nobarrier This option can be used if underlying storage guarantees
its cached data should be written to the novolatile area.
If this option is set, no cache_flush commands are issued
but f2fs still guarantees the write ordering of all the
data writes.
barrier If this option is set, cache_flush commands are allowed to be
issued.
fastboot This option is used when a system wants to reduce mount
time as much as possible, even though normal performance
can be sacrificed.
extent_cache Enable an extent cache based on rb-tree, it can cache
as many as extent which map between contiguous logical
address and physical address per inode, resulting in
increasing the cache hit ratio. Set by default.
noextent_cache Disable an extent cache based on rb-tree explicitly, see
the above extent_cache mount option.
noinline_data Disable the inline data feature, inline data feature is
enabled by default.
data_flush Enable data flushing before checkpoint in order to
persist data of regular and symlink.
reserve_root=%d Support configuring reserved space which is used for
allocation from a privileged user with specified uid or
gid, unit: 4KB, the default limit is 12.5% of user blocks.
reserve_node=%d Support configuring reserved nodes which are used for
allocation from a privileged user with specified uid or
gid, the default limit is 12.5% of all nodes.
resuid=%d The user ID which may use the reserved blocks and nodes.
resgid=%d The group ID which may use the reserved blocks and nodes.
fault_injection=%d Enable fault injection in all supported types with
specified injection rate.
fault_type=%d Support configuring fault injection type, should be
enabled with fault_injection option, fault type value
is shown below, it supports single or combined type.
.. code-block:: none
=========================== ==========
Type_Name Type_Value
=========================== ==========
FAULT_KMALLOC 0x00000001
FAULT_KVMALLOC 0x00000002
FAULT_PAGE_ALLOC 0x00000004
FAULT_PAGE_GET 0x00000008
FAULT_ALLOC_BIO 0x00000010 (obsolete)
FAULT_ALLOC_NID 0x00000020
FAULT_ORPHAN 0x00000040
FAULT_BLOCK 0x00000080
FAULT_DIR_DEPTH 0x00000100
FAULT_EVICT_INODE 0x00000200
FAULT_TRUNCATE 0x00000400
FAULT_READ_IO 0x00000800
FAULT_CHECKPOINT 0x00001000
FAULT_DISCARD 0x00002000 (obsolete)
FAULT_WRITE_IO 0x00004000
FAULT_SLAB_ALLOC 0x00008000
FAULT_DQUOT_INIT 0x00010000
FAULT_LOCK_OP 0x00020000
FAULT_BLKADDR_VALIDITY 0x00040000
FAULT_BLKADDR_CONSISTENCE 0x00080000
FAULT_NO_SEGMENT 0x00100000
FAULT_INCONSISTENT_FOOTER 0x00200000
FAULT_ATOMIC_TIMEOUT 0x00400000 (1000ms)
FAULT_VMALLOC 0x00800000
FAULT_LOCK_TIMEOUT 0x01000000 (1000ms)
FAULT_SKIP_WRITE 0x02000000
=========================== ==========
mode=%s Control block allocation mode which supports "adaptive"
and "lfs". In "lfs" mode, there should be no random
writes towards main area.
"fragment:segment" and "fragment:block" are newly added here.
These are developer options for experiments to simulate filesystem
fragmentation/after-GC situation itself. The developers use these
modes to understand filesystem fragmentation/after-GC condition well,
and eventually get some insights to handle them better.
In "fragment:segment", f2fs allocates a new segment in random
position. With this, we can simulate the after-GC condition.
In "fragment:block", we can scatter block allocation with
"max_fragment_chunk" and "max_fragment_hole" sysfs nodes.
We added some randomness to both chunk and hole size to make
it close to realistic IO pattern. So, in this mode, f2fs will allocate
1..<max_fragment_chunk> blocks in a chunk and make a hole in the
length of 1..<max_fragment_hole> by turns. With this, the newly
allocated blocks will be scattered throughout the whole partition.
Note that "fragment:block" implicitly enables "fragment:segment"
option for more randomness.
Please, use these options for your experiments and we strongly
recommend to re-format the filesystem after using these options.
usrquota Enable plain user disk quota accounting.
grpquota Enable plain group disk quota accounting.
prjquota Enable plain project quota accounting.
usrjquota=<file> Appoint specified file and type during mount, so that quota
grpjquota=<file> information can be properly updated during recovery flow,
prjjquota=<file> <quota file>: must be in root directory;
jqfmt=<quota type> <quota type>: [vfsold,vfsv0,vfsv1].
usrjquota= Turn off user journalled quota.
grpjquota= Turn off group journalled quota.
prjjquota= Turn off project journalled quota.
quota Enable plain user disk quota accounting.
noquota Disable all plain disk quota option.
alloc_mode=%s Adjust block allocation policy, which supports "reuse"
and "default".
fsync_mode=%s Control the policy of fsync. Currently supports "posix",
"strict", and "nobarrier". In "posix" mode, which is
default, fsync will follow POSIX semantics and does a
light operation to improve the filesystem performance.
In "strict" mode, fsync will be heavy and behaves in line
with xfs, ext4 and btrfs, where xfstest generic/342 will
pass, but the performance will regress. "nobarrier" is
based on "posix", but doesn't issue flush command for
non-atomic files likewise "nobarrier" mount option.
test_dummy_encryption
test_dummy_encryption=%s
Enable dummy encryption, which provides a fake fscrypt
context. The fake fscrypt context is used by xfstests.
The argument may be either "v1" or "v2", in order to
select the corresponding fscrypt policy version.
checkpoint=%s[:%u[%]] Set to "disable" to turn off checkpointing. Set to "enable"
to re-enable checkpointing. Is enabled by default. While
disabled, any unmounting or unexpected shutdowns will cause
the filesystem contents to appear as they did when the
filesystem was mounted with that option.
While mounting with checkpoint=disable, the filesystem must
run garbage collection to ensure that all available space can
be used. If this takes too much time, the mount may return
EAGAIN. You may optionally add a value to indicate how much
of the disk you would be willing to temporarily give up to
avoid additional garbage collection. This can be given as a
number of blocks, or as a percent. For instance, mounting
with checkpoint=disable:100% would always succeed, but it may
hide up to all remaining free space. The actual space that
would be unusable can be viewed at /sys/fs/f2fs/<disk>/unusable
This space is reclaimed once checkpoint=enable.
checkpoint_merge When checkpoint is enabled, this can be used to create a kernel
daemon and make it to merge concurrent checkpoint requests as
much as possible to eliminate redundant checkpoint issues. Plus,
we can eliminate the sluggish issue caused by slow checkpoint
operation when the checkpoint is done in a process context in
a cgroup having low i/o budget and cpu shares. To make this
do better, we set the default i/o priority of the kernel daemon
to "3", to give one higher priority than other kernel threads.
This is the same way to give a I/O priority to the jbd2
journaling thread of ext4 filesystem.
nocheckpoint_merge Disable checkpoint merge feature.
compress_algorithm=%s Control compress algorithm, currently f2fs supports "lzo",
"lz4", "zstd" and "lzo-rle" algorithm.
compress_algorithm=%s:%d Control compress algorithm and its compress level, now, only
"lz4" and "zstd" support compress level config::
========= ===========
algorithm level range
========= ===========
lz4 3 - 16
zstd 1 - 22
========= ===========
compress_log_size=%u Support configuring compress cluster size. The size will
be 4KB * (1 << %u). The default and minimum sizes are 16KB.
compress_extension=%s Support adding specified extension, so that f2fs can enable
compression on those corresponding files, e.g. if all files
with '.ext' has high compression rate, we can set the '.ext'
on compression extension list and enable compression on
these file by default rather than to enable it via ioctl.
For other files, we can still enable compression via ioctl.
Note that, there is one reserved special extension '*', it
can be set to enable compression for all files.
nocompress_extension=%s Support adding specified extension, so that f2fs can disable
compression on those corresponding files, just contrary to compression extension.
If you know exactly which files cannot be compressed, you can use this.
The same extension name can't appear in both compress and nocompress
extension at the same time.
If the compress extension specifies all files, the types specified by the
nocompress extension will be treated as special cases and will not be compressed.
Don't allow use '*' to specifie all file in nocompress extension.
After add nocompress_extension, the priority should be:
dir_flag < comp_extention,nocompress_extension < comp_file_flag,no_comp_file_flag.
See more in compression sections.
compress_chksum Support verifying chksum of raw data in compressed cluster.
compress_mode=%s Control file compression mode. This supports "fs" and "user"
modes. In "fs" mode (default), f2fs does automatic compression
on the compression enabled files. In "user" mode, f2fs disables
the automaic compression and gives the user discretion of
choosing the target file and the timing. The user can do manual
compression/decompression on the compression enabled files using
ioctls.
compress_cache Support to use address space of a filesystem managed inode to
cache compressed block, in order to improve cache hit ratio of
random read.
inlinecrypt When possible, encrypt/decrypt the contents of
encrypted files using inline encryption hardware rather
than the CPU. For more details, see
Documentation/filesystems/fscrypt.rst.
atgc Enable age-threshold garbage collection, it provides high
effectiveness and efficiency on background GC.
discard_unit=%s Control discard unit, the argument can be "block", "segment"
and "section", issued discard command's offset/size will be
aligned to the unit, by default, "discard_unit=block" is set,
so that small discard functionality is enabled.
For blkzoned device, "discard_unit=section" will be set by
default, it is helpful for large sized SMR or ZNS devices to
reduce memory cost by getting rid of fs metadata supports small
discard.
memory=%s Control memory mode. This supports "normal" and "low" modes.
"low" mode is introduced to support low memory devices.
Because of the nature of low memory devices, in this mode, f2fs
will try to save memory sometimes by sacrificing performance.
"normal" mode is the default mode and same as before.
age_extent_cache Enable an age extent cache based on rb-tree. It records
data block update frequency of the extent per inode, in
order to provide better temperature hints for data block
allocation.
errors=%s Specify f2fs behavior on critical errors. This supports modes:
"panic", "continue" and "remount-ro", respectively, trigger
panic immediately, continue without doing anything, and remount
the partition in read-only mode. By default it uses "continue"
mode.
.. code-block:: none
====================== =============== =============== ========
mode continue remount-ro panic
====================== =============== =============== ========
access ops normal normal N/A
syscall errors -EIO -EROFS N/A
mount option rw ro N/A
pending dir write keep keep N/A
pending non-dir write drop keep N/A
pending node write drop keep N/A
pending meta write keep keep N/A
====================== =============== =============== ========
nat_bits Enable nat_bits feature to enhance full/empty nat blocks access,
by default it's disabled.
lookup_mode=%s Control the directory lookup behavior for casefolded
directories. This option has no effect on directories
that do not have the casefold feature enabled.
.. code-block:: none
================== ========================================
Value Description
================== ========================================
perf (Default) Enforces a hash-only lookup.
The linear search fallback is always
disabled, ignoring the on-disk flag.
compat Enables the linear search fallback for
compatibility with directory entries
created by older kernel that used a
different case-folding algorithm.
This mode ignores the on-disk flag.
auto F2FS determines the mode based on the
on-disk `SB_ENC_NO_COMPAT_FALLBACK_FL`
flag.
================== ========================================
======================== ============================================================
Debugfs Entries
===============
/sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/ contains information about all the partitions mounted as
f2fs. Each file shows the whole f2fs information.
/sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/status includes:
- major file system information managed by f2fs currently
- average SIT information about whole segments
- current memory footprint consumed by f2fs.
Sysfs Entries
=============
Information about mounted f2fs file systems can be found in
/sys/fs/f2fs. Each mounted filesystem will have a directory in
/sys/fs/f2fs based on its device name (i.e., /sys/fs/f2fs/sda).
The files in each per-device directory are shown in table below.
Files in /sys/fs/f2fs/<devname>
(see also Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-fs-f2fs)
Usage
=====
1. Download userland tools and compile them.
2. Skip, if f2fs was compiled statically inside kernel.
Otherwise, insert the f2fs.ko module::
# insmod f2fs.ko
3. Create a directory to use when mounting::
# mkdir /mnt/f2fs
4. Format the block device, and then mount as f2fs::
# mkfs.f2fs -l label /dev/block_device
# mount -t f2fs /dev/block_device /mnt/f2fs
mkfs.f2fs
---------
The mkfs.f2fs is for the use of formatting a partition as the f2fs filesystem,
which builds a basic on-disk layout.
The quick options consist of:
=============== ===========================================================
``-l [label]`` Give a volume label, up to 512 unicode name.
``-a [0 or 1]`` Split start location of each area for heap-based allocation.
1 is set by default, which performs this.
``-o [int]`` Set overprovision ratio in percent over volume size.
5 is set by default.
``-s [int]`` Set the number of segments per section.
1 is set by default.
``-z [int]`` Set the number of sections per zone.
1 is set by default.
``-e [str]`` Set basic extension list. e.g. "mp3,gif,mov"
``-t [0 or 1]`` Disable discard command or not.
1 is set by default, which conducts discard.
=============== ===========================================================
Note: please refer to the manpage of mkfs.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
fsck.f2fs
---------
The fsck.f2fs is a tool to check the consistency of an f2fs-formatted
partition, which examines whether the filesystem metadata and user-made data
are cross-referenced correctly or not.
Note that, initial version of the tool does not fix any inconsistency.
The quick options consist of::
-d debug level [default:0]
Note: please refer to the manpage of fsck.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
dump.f2fs
---------
The dump.f2fs shows the information of specific inode and dumps SSA and SIT to
file. Each file is dump_ssa and dump_sit.
The dump.f2fs is used to debug on-disk data structures of the f2fs filesystem.
It shows on-disk inode information recognized by a given inode number, and is
able to dump all the SSA and SIT entries into predefined files, ./dump_ssa and
./dump_sit respectively.
The options consist of::
-d debug level [default:0]
-i inode no (hex)
-s [SIT dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
-a [SSA dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
Examples::
# dump.f2fs -i [ino] /dev/sdx
# dump.f2fs -s 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SIT dump)
# dump.f2fs -a 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SSA dump)
Note: please refer to the manpage of dump.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
sload.f2fs
----------
The sload.f2fs gives a way to insert files and directories in the existing disk
image. This tool is useful when building f2fs images given compiled files.
Note: please refer to the manpage of sload.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
resize.f2fs
-----------
The resize.f2fs lets a user resize the f2fs-formatted disk image, while preserving
all the files and directories stored in the image.
Note: please refer to the manpage of resize.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
defrag.f2fs
-----------
The defrag.f2fs can be used to defragment scattered written data as well as
filesystem metadata across the disk. This can improve the write speed by giving
more free consecutive space.
Note: please refer to the manpage of defrag.f2fs(8) to get full option list.
f2fs_io
-------
The f2fs_io is a simple tool to issue various filesystem APIs as well as
f2fs-specific ones, which is very useful for QA tests.
Note: please refer to the manpage of f2fs_io(8) to get full option list.
Design
======
On-disk Layout
--------------
F2FS divides the whole volume into a number of segments, each of which is fixed
to 2MB in size. A section is composed of consecutive segments, and a zone
consists of a set of sections. By default, section and zone sizes are set to one
segment size identically, but users can easily modify the sizes by mkfs.
F2FS splits the entire volume into six areas, and all the areas except superblock
consist of multiple segments as described below::
align with the zone size <-|
|-> align with the segment size
_________________________________________________________________________
| | | Segment | Node | Segment | |
| Superblock | Checkpoint | Info. | Address | Summary | Main |
| (SB) | (CP) | Table (SIT) | Table (NAT) | Area (SSA) | |
|____________|_____2______|______N______|______N______|______N_____|__N___|
. .
. .
. .
._________________________________________.
|_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|
. .
._________._________
|_section_|__...__|_
. .
.________.
|__zone__|
- Superblock (SB)
It is located at the beginning of the partition, and there exist two copies
to avoid file system crash. It contains basic partition information and some
default parameters of f2fs.
- Checkpoint (CP)
It contains file system information, bitmaps for valid NAT/SIT sets, orphan
inode lists, and summary entries of current active segments.
- Segment Information Table (SIT)
It contains segment information such as valid block count and bitmap for the
validity of all the blocks.
- Node Address Table (NAT)
It is composed of a block address table for all the node blocks stored in
Main area.
- Segment Summary Area (SSA)
It contains summary entries which contains the owner information of all the
data and node blocks stored in Main area.
- Main Area
It contains file and directory data including their indices.
In order to avoid misalignment between file system and flash-based storage, F2FS
aligns the start block address of CP with the segment size. Also, it aligns the
start block address of Main area with the zone size by reserving some segments
in SSA area.
Reference the following survey for additional technical details.
https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Kernel/Projects/FlashCardSurvey
File System Metadata Structure
------------------------------
F2FS adopts the checkpointing scheme to maintain file system consistency. At
mount time, F2FS first tries to find the last valid checkpoint data by scanning
CP area. In order to reduce the scanning time, F2FS uses only two copies of CP.
One of them always indicates the last valid data, which is called as shadow copy
mechanism. In addition to CP, NAT and SIT also adopt the shadow copy mechanism.
For file system consistency, each CP points to which NAT and SIT copies are
valid, as shown as below::
+--------+----------+---------+
| CP | SIT | NAT |
+--------+----------+---------+
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
+-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| CP #0 | CP #1 | SIT #0 | SIT #1 | NAT #0 | NAT #1 |
+-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
| ^ ^
| | |
`----------------------------------------'
Index Structure
---------------
The key data structure to manage the data locations is a "node". Similar to
traditional file structures, F2FS has three types of node: inode, direct node,
indirect node. F2FS assigns 4KB to an inode block which contains 923 data block
indices, two direct node pointers, two indirect node pointers, and one double
indirect node pointer as described below. One direct node block contains 1018
data blocks, and one indirect node block contains also 1018 node blocks. Thus,
one inode block (i.e., a file) covers::
4KB * (923 + 2 * 1018 + 2 * 1018 * 1018 + 1018 * 1018 * 1018) := 3.94TB.
Inode block (4KB)
|- data (923)
|- direct node (2)
| `- data (1018)
|- indirect node (2)
| `- direct node (1018)
| `- data (1018)
`- double indirect node (1)
`- indirect node (1018)
`- direct node (1018)
`- data (1018)
Note that all the node blocks are mapped by NAT which means the location of
each node is translated by the NAT table. In the consideration of the wandering
tree problem, F2FS is able to cut off the propagation of node updates caused by
leaf data writes.
Directory Structure
-------------------
A directory entry occupies 11 bytes, which consists of the following attributes.
- hash hash value of the file name
- ino inode number
- len the length of file name
- type file type such as directory, symlink, etc
A dentry block consists of 214 dentry slots and file names. Therein a bitmap is
used to represent whether each dentry is valid or not. A dentry block occupies
4KB with the following composition.
::
Dentry Block(4 K) = bitmap (27 bytes) + reserved (3 bytes) +
dentries(11 * 214 bytes) + file name (8 * 214 bytes)
[Bucket]
+--------------------------------+
|dentry block 1 | dentry block 2 |
+--------------------------------+
. .
. .
. [Dentry Block Structure: 4KB] .
+--------+----------+----------+------------+
| bitmap | reserved | dentries | file names |
+--------+----------+----------+------------+
[Dentry Block: 4KB] . .
. .
. .
+------+------+-----+------+
| hash | ino | len | type |
+------+------+-----+------+
[Dentry Structure: 11 bytes]
F2FS implements multi-level hash tables for directory structure. Each level has
a hash table with dedicated number of hash buckets as shown below. Note that
"A(2B)" means a bucket includes 2 data blocks.
::
----------------------
A : bucket
B : block
N : MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH
----------------------
level #0 | A(2B)
|
level #1 | A(2B) - A(2B)
|
level #2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B)
. | . . . .
level #N/2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - ... - A(2B)
. | . . . .
level #N | A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - ... - A(4B)
The number of blocks and buckets are determined by::
,- 2, if n < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
# of blocks in level #n = |
`- 4, Otherwise
,- 2^(n + dir_level),
| if n + dir_level < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
# of buckets in level #n = |
`- 2^((MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2) - 1),
Otherwise
When F2FS finds a file name in a directory, at first a hash value of the file
name is calculated. Then, F2FS scans the hash table in level #0 to find the
dentry consisting of the file name and its inode number. If not found, F2FS
scans the next hash table in level #1. In this way, F2FS scans hash tables in
each levels incrementally from 1 to N. In each level F2FS needs to scan only
one bucket determined by the following equation, which shows O(log(# of files))
complexity::
bucket number to scan in level #n = (hash value) % (# of buckets in level #n)
In the case of file creation, F2FS finds empty consecutive slots that cover the
file name. F2FS searches the empty slots in the hash tables of whole levels from
1 to N in the same way as the lookup operation.
The following figure shows an example of two cases holding children::
--------------> Dir <--------------
| |
child child
child - child [hole] - child
child - child - child [hole] - [hole] - child
Case 1: Case 2:
Number of children = 6, Number of children = 3,
File size = 7 File size = 7
Default Block Allocation
------------------------
At runtime, F2FS manages six active logs inside "Main" area: Hot/Warm/Cold node
and Hot/Warm/Cold data.
- Hot node contains direct node blocks of directories.
- Warm node contains direct node blocks except hot node blocks.
- Cold node contains indirect node blocks
- Hot data contains dentry blocks
- Warm data contains data blocks except hot and cold data blocks
- Cold data contains multimedia data or migrated data blocks
LFS has two schemes for free space management: threaded log and copy-and-compac-
tion. The copy-and-compaction scheme which is known as cleaning, is well-suited
for devices showing very good sequential write performance, since free segments
are served all the time for writing new data. However, it suffers from cleaning
overhead under high utilization. Contrarily, the threaded log scheme suffers
from random writes, but no cleaning process is needed. F2FS adopts a hybrid
scheme where the copy-and-compaction scheme is adopted by default, but the
policy is dynamically changed to the threaded log scheme according to the file
system status.
In order to align F2FS with underlying flash-based storage, F2FS allocates a
segment in a unit of section. F2FS expects that the section size would be the
same as the unit size of garbage collection in FTL. Furthermore, with respect
to the mapping granularity in FTL, F2FS allocates each section of the active
logs from different zones as much as possible, since FTL can write the data in
the active logs into one allocation unit according to its mapping granularity.
Cleaning process
----------------
F2FS does cleaning both on demand and in the background. On-demand cleaning is
triggered when there are not enough free segments to serve VFS calls. Background
cleaner is operated by a kernel thread, and triggers the cleaning job when the
system is idle.
F2FS supports two victim selection policies: greedy and cost-benefit algorithms.
In the greedy algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment having the smallest number
of valid blocks. In the cost-benefit algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment
according to the segment age and the number of valid blocks in order to address
log block thrashing problem in the greedy algorithm. F2FS adopts the greedy
algorithm for on-demand cleaner, while background cleaner adopts cost-benefit
algorithm.
In order to identify whether the data in the victim segment are valid or not,
F2FS manages a bitmap. Each bit represents the validity of a block, and the
bitmap is composed of a bit stream covering whole blocks in main area.
Write-hint Policy
-----------------
F2FS sets the whint all the time with the below policy.
===================== ======================== ===================
User F2FS Block
===================== ======================== ===================
N/A META WRITE_LIFE_NONE|REQ_META
N/A HOT_NODE WRITE_LIFE_NONE
N/A WARM_NODE WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM
N/A COLD_NODE WRITE_LIFE_LONG
ioctl(COLD) COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
extension list " "
-- buffered io
------------------------------------------------------------------
N/A COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
N/A HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
N/A WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
-- direct io
------------------------------------------------------------------
WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME COLD_DATA WRITE_LIFE_EXTREME
WRITE_LIFE_SHORT HOT_DATA WRITE_LIFE_SHORT
WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET WARM_DATA WRITE_LIFE_NOT_SET
WRITE_LIFE_NONE " WRITE_LIFE_NONE
WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM " WRITE_LIFE_MEDIUM
WRITE_LIFE_LONG " WRITE_LIFE_LONG
===================== ======================== ===================
Fallocate(2) Policy
-------------------
The default policy follows the below POSIX rule.
Allocating disk space
The default operation (i.e., mode is zero) of fallocate() allocates
the disk space within the range specified by offset and len. The
file size (as reported by stat(2)) will be changed if offset+len is
greater than the file size. Any subregion within the range specified
by offset and len that did not contain data before the call will be
initialized to zero. This default behavior closely resembles the
behavior of the posix_fallocate(3) library function, and is intended
as a method of optimally implementing that function.
However, once F2FS receives ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_SET_PIN_FILE) in prior to
fallocate(fd, DEFAULT_MODE), it allocates on-disk block addresses having
zero or random data, which is useful to the below scenario where:
1. create(fd)
2. ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_SET_PIN_FILE)
3. fallocate(fd, 0, 0, size)
4. address = fibmap(fd, offset)
5. open(blkdev)
6. write(blkdev, address)
Compression implementation
--------------------------
- New term named cluster is defined as basic unit of compression, file can
be divided into multiple clusters logically. One cluster includes 4 << n
(n >= 0) logical pages, compression size is also cluster size, each of
cluster can be compressed or not.
- In cluster metadata layout, one special block address is used to indicate
a cluster is a compressed one or normal one; for compressed cluster, following
metadata maps cluster to [1, 4 << n - 1] physical blocks, in where f2fs
stores data including compress header and compressed data.
- In order to eliminate write amplification during overwrite, F2FS only
support compression on write-once file, data can be compressed only when
all logical blocks in cluster contain valid data and compress ratio of
cluster data is lower than specified threshold.
- To enable compression on regular inode, there are four ways:
* chattr +c file
* chattr +c dir; touch dir/file
* mount w/ -o compress_extension=ext; touch file.ext
* mount w/ -o compress_extension=*; touch any_file
- To disable compression on regular inode, there are two ways:
* chattr -c file
* mount w/ -o nocompress_extension=ext; touch file.ext
- Priority in between FS_COMPR_FL, FS_NOCOMP_FS, extensions:
* compress_extension=so; nocompress_extension=zip; chattr +c dir; touch
dir/foo.so; touch dir/bar.zip; touch dir/baz.txt; then foo.so and baz.txt
should be compresse, bar.zip should be non-compressed. chattr +c dir/bar.zip
can enable compress on bar.zip.
* compress_extension=so; nocompress_extension=zip; chattr -c dir; touch
dir/foo.so; touch dir/bar.zip; touch dir/baz.txt; then foo.so should be
compresse, bar.zip and baz.txt should be non-compressed.
chattr+c dir/bar.zip; chattr+c dir/baz.txt; can enable compress on bar.zip
and baz.txt.
- At this point, compression feature doesn't expose compressed space to user
directly in order to guarantee potential data updates later to the space.
Instead, the main goal is to reduce data writes to flash disk as much as
possible, resulting in extending disk life time as well as relaxing IO
congestion. Alternatively, we've added ioctl(F2FS_IOC_RELEASE_COMPRESS_BLOCKS)
interface to reclaim compressed space and show it to user after setting a
special flag to the inode. Once the compressed space is released, the flag
will block writing data to the file until either the compressed space is
reserved via ioctl(F2FS_IOC_RESERVE_COMPRESS_BLOCKS) or the file size is
truncated to zero.
Compress metadata layout::
[Dnode Structure]
+-----------------------------------------------+
| cluster 1 | cluster 2 | ......... | cluster N |
+-----------------------------------------------+
. . . .
. . . .
. Compressed Cluster . . Normal Cluster .
+----------+---------+---------+---------+ +---------+---------+---------+---------+
|compr flag| block 1 | block 2 | block 3 | | block 1 | block 2 | block 3 | block 4 |
+----------+---------+---------+---------+ +---------+---------+---------+---------+
. .
. .
. .
+-------------+-------------+----------+----------------------------+
| data length | data chksum | reserved | compressed data |
+-------------+-------------+----------+----------------------------+
Compression mode
--------------------------
f2fs supports "fs" and "user" compression modes with "compression_mode" mount option.
With this option, f2fs provides a choice to select the way how to compress the
compression enabled files (refer to "Compression implementation" section for how to
enable compression on a regular inode).
1) compress_mode=fs
This is the default option. f2fs does automatic compression in the writeback of the
compression enabled files.
2) compress_mode=user
This disables the automatic compression and gives the user discretion of choosing the
target file and the timing. The user can do manual compression/decompression on the
compression enabled files using F2FS_IOC_DECOMPRESS_FILE and F2FS_IOC_COMPRESS_FILE
ioctls like the below.
To decompress a file::
fd = open(filename, O_WRONLY, 0);
ret = ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_DECOMPRESS_FILE);
To compress a file::
fd = open(filename, O_WRONLY, 0);
ret = ioctl(fd, F2FS_IOC_COMPRESS_FILE);
NVMe Zoned Namespace devices
----------------------------
- ZNS defines a per-zone capacity which can be equal or less than the
zone-size. Zone-capacity is the number of usable blocks in the zone.
F2FS checks if zone-capacity is less than zone-size, if it is, then any
segment which starts after the zone-capacity is marked as not-free in
the free segment bitmap at initial mount time. These segments are marked
as permanently used so they are not allocated for writes and
consequently are not needed to be garbage collected. In case the
zone-capacity is not aligned to default segment size(2MB), then a segment
can start before the zone-capacity and span across zone-capacity boundary.
Such spanning segments are also considered as usable segments. All blocks
past the zone-capacity are considered unusable in these segments.
Device aliasing feature
-----------------------
f2fs can utilize a special file called a "device aliasing file." This file allows
the entire storage device to be mapped with a single, large extent, not using
the usual f2fs node structures. This mapped area is pinned and primarily intended
for holding the space.
Essentially, this mechanism allows a portion of the f2fs area to be temporarily
reserved and used by another filesystem or for different purposes. Once that
external usage is complete, the device aliasing file can be deleted, releasing
the reserved space back to F2FS for its own use.
.. code-block::
# ls /dev/vd*
/dev/vdb (32GB) /dev/vdc (32GB)
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdc
# mkfs.f2fs -c /dev/vdc@vdc.file /dev/vdb
# mount /dev/vdb /mnt/f2fs
# ls -l /mnt/f2fs
vdc.file
# df -h
/dev/vdb 64G 33G 32G 52% /mnt/f2fs
# mount -o loop /dev/vdc /mnt/ext4
# df -h
/dev/vdb 64G 33G 32G 52% /mnt/f2fs
/dev/loop7 32G 24K 30G 1% /mnt/ext4
# umount /mnt/ext4
# f2fs_io getflags /mnt/f2fs/vdc.file
get a flag on /mnt/f2fs/vdc.file ret=0, flags=nocow(pinned),immutable
# f2fs_io setflags noimmutable /mnt/f2fs/vdc.file
get a flag on noimmutable ret=0, flags=800010
set a flag on /mnt/f2fs/vdc.file ret=0, flags=noimmutable
# rm /mnt/f2fs/vdc.file
# df -h
/dev/vdb 64G 753M 64G 2% /mnt/f2fs
So, the key idea is, user can do any file operations on /dev/vdc, and
reclaim the space after the use, while the space is counted as /data.
That doesn't require modifying partition size and filesystem format.
Per-file Read-Only Large Folio Support
--------------------------------------
F2FS implements large folio support on the read path to leverage high-order
page allocation for significant performance gains. To minimize code complexity,
this support is currently excluded from the write path, which requires handling
complex optimizations such as compression and block allocation modes.
This optional feature is triggered only when a file's immutable bit is set.
Consequently, F2FS will return EOPNOTSUPP if a user attempts to open a cached
file with write permissions, even immediately after clearing the bit. Write
access is only restored once the cached inode is dropped. The usage flow is
demonstrated below:
.. code-block::
# f2fs_io setflags immutable /data/testfile_read_seq
/* flush and reload the inode to enable the large folio */
# sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
/* mmap(MAP_POPULATE) + mlock() */
# f2fs_io read 128 0 1024 mmap 1 0 /data/testfile_read_seq
/* mmap() + fadvise(POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED) + mlock() */
# f2fs_io read 128 0 1024 fadvise 1 0 /data/testfile_read_seq
/* mmap() + mlock2(MLOCK_ONFAULT) + madvise(MADV_POPULATE_READ) */
# f2fs_io read 128 0 1024 madvise 1 0 /data/testfile_read_seq
# f2fs_io clearflags immutable /data/testfile_read_seq
# f2fs_io write 1 0 1 zero buffered /data/testfile_read_seq
Failed to open /mnt/test/test: Operation not supported
/* flush and reload the inode to disable the large folio */
# sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
# f2fs_io write 1 0 1 zero buffered /data/testfile_read_seq
Written 4096 bytes with pattern = zero, total_time = 29 us, max_latency = 28 us
# rm /data/testfile_read_seq
