In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel.
Btrfs with Linux 6.14 introduces an experimental RAID1 round-robin read mode as previously covered plus several other adjustments to this copy-on-write file-system. The highlights include:
- There are more read I/O balancing strategies as experimental options. Namely for testing purposes is the ability to select a preferred device for all reads. Or there is also a new round-robin mode that balances reads across devices relevant for the requested I/O range. These new modes are relevant for RAID1 read operations.
- Btrfs added an encoded write ioctl for IO_uring to complement the encoded read support added in Linux 6.12.
- Support for FS_IOC_READ_VERITY_METADATA where applications can make use of that VERITY metadata for their own verification purposes. The VERITY metadata from a file includes the Merkle tree, the descriptor, and the built-in signature where available.
- The Btrfs RAID stripe tree has various fixes, hole punching support to the extent range, reducing the number of stripe tree lookups on bio submission, and better test coverage.
- Error handling improvements for Btrfs.
- Various other code clean-ups, fixes, and minor enhancements.
More details on these Btrfs feature changes via this pull.