The Linux kernel is the backbone of Linux operating systems (OS), and is the fundamental interface between a computer's hardware and its processes.
The next version of the kernel Linux 6.2 should bring improvements in file system management, including the performance of SD cards and USB keys, as well as FUSE.
For such a mature operating system kernel, there are still considerable improvements in handling existing disk formats, and this may improve with the release of kernel 6.2. Also, in the opinion of some specialists, next-generation Linux file systems would not advance quickly.
Matthew Wilcox oracle linux kernel developer, recommended removing the ReiserFS filesystem, a file system developed especially for the Linux operating system by Hans Reiser and the Namesys company. It was the first journal file system to be accepted in the kernel and was developed when Ext file systems were not yet planned.
The reason Wilcox gives to support your idea to remove the ReiserFS file system is the additional difficulty of modernizing the infrastructure from the kernel caused by the fact that you are forced to leave the AOP_FLAG_CONT_EXPAND tag in the kernel because reiserfs is still the only filesystem that uses this tag in the Write_begin function. Likewise, the last correction in the reiserfs code dates from the year 2019.
SUSE's Jan Kara reported that Reiserfs is on its way to obsolescence, but it cannot be concluded that it is out of date to be removed from the kernel. According to some analysts, Reiserfs is still offered on OpenSUSE, but the user base of this FS is negligible and constantly shrinking. For professional users, support for Reiserfs in SUSE was discontinued 3-4 years ago and the reiserfs module is not included in the default package with the kernel.
Another change what is expected it is in the file system and POSIX Traditionally, systems that support the Portable Operating System Interface Standards (POSIX) family share a simple but powerful file system permission model.
It's been a long time since engineers recognized the shortcomings of the traditional permit model and began to think of alternatives. This eventually gave rise to a number of access control list (ACL) implementations on UNIX, which are compatible with each other only to a certain extent. Christian Brauner, a former Ubuntu engineer and now a Microsoft engineer, submitted a detailed patch to add a dedicated VFS (Virtual File System) API to POSIX ACLs. These have been supported for a long time, but the new version should clean up and simplify their management.
Brauner also sent a patch to support ID mounts for SquashFS volumes. This is a plugin to their previous patch that introduced mounts assigned by ID, which also contains an explanation of how they work and what they are used for.
There are also enhancements for some of the more established file systems. One of them is a list of fixes and improvements for XFS, which points to the important new online repair feature. Another patch brings performance improvements to volumes mounted with FUSE; in other words, when the filesystem code is executed in a userspace program, not as part of the kernel. There are even some bug fixes for the now venerable ext4.
In addition to that, also improvements are expected in Btrfs which became the default file system for desktops in Fedora Linux 33, and Fedora Linux 34 Beta builds on that work by enabling transparent compression for more storage space.
This is designed to help significantly increase the life of flash media. This compression will be essential to boost read and write performance of larger files, with the potential to add significant time savings to workflows.
There are also some improvements in Btrfs, particularly in its handling of RAID 5 and 6. In particular, a workaround addresses the "read-modify-write" issue for Btrfs RAID5 (but not RAID6) arrays. This is a good thing, but these drive layouts are still not recommended. According to the terms of the product documentation itself: This feature should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing.