Coming in as a late pull request ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window closing this weekend were the Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates that have now made it into Linux Git.

For improving the multi-device experience of F2FS, with Linux 7.3 the F2FS driver will now issue multi-device flushes in parallel. The improvement comes thanks to Samsung engineer Yonggil Song for ensuring F2FS on multiple devices all see their necessary flushes and done so in parallel rather than sequentially. With each device having independent flush queues, there was no reason to not do it in parallel. The flush window is now bound to the slowest device on the system rather than waiting on the sum of all device flushes for better time savings.

F2FS with Linux 7.3 also reduces the memory overhead of inode management, now supports dynamic reserve/release for device aliasing, and support for running f2fs_write_end_io() asynchronously for better I/O throughput. The asynchronous f2fs_write_end_io() on an Arm Cortex-A520 device dropped the time spent from 10 ms to 150 microseconds.

There are also many bug fixes for F2FS in Linux 7.3 as outlined in this pull request.