F2FS Features in Nitrux

Since Nitrux 2.8.0, the /home and /var/lib partitions use F2FS. These F2FS-formatted partitions will also use the following additional filesystem features.

• Compression using zstd with compression at level 6. The primary goal is to reduce writes to extend the flash lifetime and, potentially, to achieve a slight performance increase.
• Verification of compressed blocks using a checksum to avoid corruption.
• Enable a better garbage collector and asynchronous garbage collection.
• Avoid synchronously updating access or modification times, which improves I/O performance and flash durability.
• The filesystem applies encryption at the directory level, and different directories can use different encryption keys.

Important Notes

Since Nitrux 5.1.0, we provide our own implementation of mkfs.f2fs so that new F2FS partitions can support compression. However, existing F2FS partitions cannot be “made” to support it, unless the user recreates them.