On Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 11:43:21AM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
Could you please enable CONFIG_F2FS_FS in the cloud kernel?
[...]
What makes you think f2fs will be commonly used in cloud deployments?
I don't know that it will be, but as it supports encryption and compression
and benchmarks shows it performs at least as well as ext4, I don't see why
it couldn't be a good choice for virtual machines. It seems at least as
useful in a cloud deployment as minix and hpfs which are included in this
flavour.
This sounds like a good argument for turning off minix and hpfs to me.
;)
Is F2FS usable as a Debian root filesystem? Does it support all the
features (file capabilities and POSIX ACLs, for example) that are
commonly used on Debian systems?
The cloud team, for what it's worth, does not have any plans to switch
from ext4 in the forseeable future. (We probably would not do so unless
Debian made the change distro-wide.) That doesn't mean we shouldn't
consider enabling it, but I'd like to see a clearer use case. My small
amount of research into it (mostly reading wikipedia and a couple of the
reference sources) suggests that it's most popular on phones and similar
devices, not cloud instances. Do you see use cases involving
manipulating filesystems for those type of devices in cloud VMs? Or
something else?
How are crypto keys handled for its encryption functionality?
The cloud kernel is not expected to be useful for 100% of people, even
in cloud environments. In cases where specific functionality is needed
that isn't available in the cloud kernel, the generic kernel is
available and I'd probably recommend that.