Western Digital develops new Linux file system, Zonefs

In recent years, from the RISC-V architecture to storage enhancements, Western Digital has made a greater contribution to the Linux kernel. The latest code it has been working on in recent weeks is the new Linux file system. However, the new Western Digital product is not intended to be a universal file system that competes with EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ZFS on Linux. This new file system, Zonefs, is suitable for special use cases and runs on block devices.

Damien Le Moal of Western Digital describes Zonefs as “zonefs is not a POSIX compliant file system. It’s goal is to simplify the implementation of zoned block devices support in applications by replacing raw block device file accesses with a richer file based API, avoiding relying on direct block device file ioctls which may be more obscure to developers. One example of this approach is the implementation of LSM (log-structured merge) tree structures (such as used in RocksDB and LevelDB) on zoned block devices by allowing SSTables to be stored in a zone file similarly to a regular file system rather than as a range of sectors of a zoned device. The introduction of the higher level construct “one file is one zone” can help reducing the amount of changes needed in the application while at the same time allowing the use of zoned block devices with various programming languages other than C.”

In fact, Western Digital has been investing heavily in partitioned storage to allow the use of larger-capacity, economical devices. More background information on partition storage can be found on the Western Digital blog. Currently, their proposed Zonefs file system contains only about 1500 new lines of code.

Via: Phoronix