Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel - Phoronix

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact

Popular Categories

Close

Articles & Reviews

News Archive

Forums

Premium

Contact

Categories

Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals

Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 16 June 2026 at 05:16 PM EDT. 14 Comments

There is no shortage of different file-systems available for Linux. New file-systems continue to come about in the open-source world but ultimately many of them end up not being well maintained or having very limited users and not necessarily innovating enough to make them worthwhile over other alternatives. Given the continued increase in file-systems looking to get into the Linux kernel, such as FTRFS and VMUFAT being some of the most recent and then even having multiple NTFS drivers for Linux, there is now documentation in place to formally lay out criteria for new file-systems to be accepted.

In early May I reported on documentation proposed to lay out requirements for any future file-systems. In particular, the ongoing number of file-systems being added ends up causing a burden on VFS maintainers and other Linux storage/file-system development, especially when file-systems end up being abandoned or poorly maintained.

Among the requirements laid out for in-kernel file-systems is ensuring any new file-system is unique enough over adding to existing implementations, FUSE user-space file-systems being a better fit often for niche use-cases, and more. New file-systems that do innovate enough for mainline also must use modern VFS interfaces, provide the necessary user-space utilities like mkfs and fsck, be testable in a friendly manner, and be covered in the necessary documentation.

Anyhow, the news today is that this documentation has been accepted without objections and is part of the Linux 7.2 kernel. The documentation on adding new file-systems to Linux was merged without fanfare and now in place as the expectations for any new file-system effort with dreams of getting into the mainline kernel.

Those interested can read the new documentation in full via Documentation/filesystems/adding-new-filesystems.rst with the latest Git tree for Linux 7.2.

14 Comments

Tweet

Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2<br>Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency<br>Linux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things<br>XFS Zone Allocator No Longer Experimental With Linux 7.2<br>Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code<br>Reading /proc/filesystems Is Surprisingly Done Very Often & Now As Much As 444% Faster

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Affected Packages<br>ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life<br>macOS 27 Beta Breaks The Ability To Boot Asahi Linux<br>Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware<br>Arch Linux AUR Hit By Another Wave Of Now More Sophisticated Malware Attack<br>YSERVER: Modern X11 Server Written In Rust With The Help Of Claude Code<br>Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR<br>AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform

Mozilla Firefox Usage Of zlib-rs For Better Safety & Performance

Linux Enacts Guidance To Tighten Acceptance Of New File-Systems Into The Kernel

KDE Plasma 6 Desktop Finally Comes To Slackware

Btrfs Now Enables Large Folios By Default, Lands Huge Folios With Linux 7.2

Wayland's Weston 16 Alpha Brings HDR Improvements, Vulkan Renderer Fixes

Linux 7.2 Improves Anonymous/Unnamed Pipe Performance For Shell Pipelines & More

Intel Compute Runtime Now Advertises Early Support For Nova Lake, Introduces Experimental "LEO"

Linux 7.2 Can Significantly Lower Container Exit/Unmount Latency

Linux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things

Wine Wayland Lands Fractional Scaling Support

KDE Plasma 6.7 Released With Per-Screen Virtual Desktops, Wayland Improvements

Linux 7.2 Drops Driver For The 40+ Year Old Hercules Monochrome ISA Graphics Card

Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For...