Why isn't F2FS support in the Kernel?

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Gerald B. Cox <gbcox at bzb.us> wrote:

> From what I read it has the possibility of getting rid of FAT / NTFS on
> flash devices;
> which would be a good thing - and I thought that would be something the
> Fedora community
> would be interested with participating.

UDF has been in the best position to do this for ~ 20 years, seeing as
it has had Windows, OS X, and linux distro support for most of that
time frame. And yet it didn't supplant FAT or NTFS on flash media on
any platform or distribution.

F2FS's main benefit is its tunablity. Meanwhile manufacturers aren't
going to make the internal geometry or FTL scheme their using
discoverable. Therefore a default format won't result in tuned
storage. It'll require the initiator of the format command to have
product specific knowledge so that the right format options are used.
This suggests a manufacturer specific formatting utility, assuming the
idea is to make F2FS general purpose across Windows, OS X and Linux.
But since there are no Windows or OS X drivers that's a premature
conclusion.

I think more likely it's a way to supplant all other file systems,
including Linux file systems, for tablets, phones, IVI, and other
embedded products. The manufacturers of those systems can use F2FS
across the board, and get the optimum formatting command from their
flash vendor of choice; and as they find out, probably as Samsung
hopes, that this will show Samsung flash outperforms everyone else
when optimized, that more embedded product developers will choose
Samsung flash.


-- 
Chris Murphy