.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
======================================
-Enhanced Read-Only File System - EROFS
+EROFS - Enhanced Read-Only File System
======================================
Overview
========
-EROFS file-system stands for Enhanced Read-Only File System. Different
-from other read-only file systems, it aims to be designed for flexibility,
-scalability, but be kept simple and high performance.
+EROFS filesystem stands for Enhanced Read-Only File System. It aims to form a
+generic read-only filesystem solution for various read-only use cases instead
+of just focusing on storage space saving without considering any side effects
+of runtime performance.
-It is designed as a better filesystem solution for the following scenarios:
+It is designed to meet the needs of flexibility, feature extendability and user
+payload friendly, etc. Apart from those, it is still kept as a simple
+random-access friendly high-performance filesystem to get rid of unneeded I/O
+amplification and memory-resident overhead compared to similar approaches.
+
+It is implemented to be a better choice for the following scenarios:
- read-only storage media or
- part of a fully trusted read-only solution, which means it needs to be
immutable and bit-for-bit identical to the official golden image for
- their releases due to security and other considerations and
+ their releases due to security or other considerations and
- hope to minimize extra storage space with guaranteed end-to-end performance
by using compact layout, transparent file compression and direct access,
especially for those embedded devices with limited memory and high-density
- hosts with numerous containers;
+ hosts with numerous containers.
Here is the main features of EROFS:
- Little endian on-disk design;
- - Currently 4KB block size (nobh) and therefore maximum 16TB address space;
-
- - Metadata & data could be mixed by design;
+ - 4KiB block size and 32-bit block addresses, therefore 16TiB address space
+ at most for now;
- - 2 inode versions for different requirements:
+ - Two inode layouts for different requirements:
- ===================== ============ =====================================
+ ===================== ============ ======================================
compact (v1) extended (v2)
- ===================== ============ =====================================
+ ===================== ============ ======================================
Inode metadata size 32 bytes 64 bytes
- Max file size 4 GB 16 EB (also limited by max. vol size)
+ Max file size 4 GiB 16 EiB (also limited by max. vol size)
Max uids/gids 65536 4294967296
Per-inode timestamp no yes (64 + 32-bit timestamp)
Max hardlinks 65536 4294967296
- Metadata reserved 4 bytes 14 bytes
- ===================== ============ =====================================
+ Metadata reserved 8 bytes 18 bytes
+ ===================== ============ ======================================
+
+ - Metadata and data could be mixed as an option;
- Support extended attributes (xattrs) as an option;
- - Support xattr inline and tail-end data inline for all files;
+ - Support tailpacking data and xattr inline compared to byte-addressed
+ unaligned metadata or smaller block size alternatives;
- Support POSIX.1e ACLs by using xattrs;
- Support transparent data compression as an option:
- LZ4 algorithm with the fixed-sized output compression for high performance;
+ LZ4 and MicroLZMA algorithms can be used on a per-file basis; In addition,
+ inplace decompression is also supported to avoid bounce compressed buffers
+ and page cache thrashing.
+
+ - Support direct I/O on uncompressed files to avoid double caching for loop
+ devices;
- - Multiple device support for multi-layer container images.
+ - Support FSDAX on uncompressed images for secure containers and ramdisks in
+ order to get rid of unnecessary page cache.
+
+ - Support multiple devices for multi blob container images;
+
+ - Support file-based on-demand loading with the Fscache infrastructure.
The following git tree provides the file system user-space tools under
-development (ex, formatting tool mkfs.erofs):
+development, such as a formatting tool (mkfs.erofs), an on-disk consistency &
+compatibility checking tool (fsck.erofs), and a debugging tool (dump.erofs):
- git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xiang/erofs-utils.git
Documentation/filesystems/dax.rst.
dax A legacy option which is an alias for ``dax=always``.
device=%s Specify a path to an extra device to be used together.
+fsid=%s Specify a filesystem image ID for Fscache back-end.
=================== =========================================================
Sysfs Entries
the total number of directory entries in this block since it is no need to
introduce another on-disk field at all.
-Chunk-based file
-----------------
+Chunk-based files
+-----------------
In order to support chunk-based data deduplication, a new inode data layout has
been supported since Linux v5.15: Files are split in equal-sized data chunks
with ``extents`` area of the inode metadata indicating how to get the chunk