kernel / Documentation / filesystems / f2fs.rst

.. 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:

- [e-mail]

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.
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
			     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_TIMEOUT                    0x00400000 (1000ms)
			     FAULT_VMALLOC                    0x00800000
			     ===========================      ==========
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 the blk-crypto framework rather than
			 filesystem-layer encryption. This allows the use of
			 inline encryption hardware. The on-disk format is
			 unaffected. For more details, see
			 Documentation/block/inline-encryption.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/[e-mail] /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.