XFS status update for August 2008

With the 2.6.27-rc5 release the 2.6.27 cycle is nearing it's end. The major XFS feature in 2.6.27-rc5 is support for case-insensitive file names. At this point it is still limited to 7bit ASCII file names, with updates for utf8 file names expected to follow later. In addition to that 2.6.27-rc5 fixes a long-standing problem with non-EABI arm compiler which pack some XFS data structures wrongly. Besides this 2.6.27-rc5 also contains various cleanups, most notably the removal of the last bhv_vnode_t instances, and most uses of semaphores. As usual the diffstat for XFS from 2.6.26 to 2.6.26-rc5 is negative:

       100 files changed, 3819 insertions(+), 4409 deletions(-)

On the user space front a new minor xfsprogs version is about to be released containing various fixes including the user space part of arm packing fix.

Work in progress on the XFS mailing list are a large patch set to unify the alloc, inobt and bmap btree implementation into a single that supports arbitrarily pluggable key and record formats. These btree changes are the first major preparation for adding CRC checks to all metadata structures in XFS, and an even larger patch set to unify the XFS and Linux inode structures, and perform all inode write back from the btree uses instead of an inode cache in XFS.