The 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit

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The Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of core-kernel developers; it is one of the most intensive and technical events on the annual calendar. The 2019 LSFMM Summit was held April 30 to May 2 in San Juan, Puerto Rico; it was supplemented this year by a special track dedicated to the BPF virtual machine. Once again, LWN was there and able to cover a portion of the sessions.

Our coverage is a work in progress; the articles that are available at this point are:

Plenary sessions

There were a few sessions of general interest attended by all developers at the event.

Filesystem sessions

The filesystem developers discussed the following topics in their track:

Filesystem and storage sessions

Some sessions were shared discussions involving both storage and filesystem developers:

Issues around discard: Dennis Zhou brings up some problems using discard—telling the block device that some blocks are no longer being used—and looks for ways to handle them better.

Supporting the UFS turbo-write mode: a new mode for Universal Flash Storage (UFS) devices is meant to speed up write operations, but there are questions on what the kernel should do to support it.

Filesystems for zoned block devices: a discussion on support for zoned block devices in Btrfs and a new filesystem, ZoneFS, to provide another means of accessing shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and other zoned devices.

Storage testing: making it easier for more kernel developers to run testing for the block layer.

A way to do atomic writes: a discussion about adding a feature for atomic writes at the filesystem layer.

Filesystem and memory-management sessions

There were a few sessions for both the filesystem and memory-management developers:

Transparent huge pages for filesystems: a possible first step toward supporting transparent huge pages for file pages.

Shrinking filesystem caches for dying control groups: a follow-up discussion that focused on the filesystem caches for control groups that are dying.

Memory-management sessions

The memory-management developers sequestered themselves to dive into a number of detailed topics:

Group photo

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the LSFMM 2019 program committee for inviting LWN to the event, and to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for supporting our travel to Puerto Rico.

