EXT4 Better Hardened Against Maliciously-Fuzzed File-Systems
Ted Ts'o at Google has sent out the EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel.
While Bcachefs is stabilizing its on-disk format and Btrfs adding real-time Zstd compression, EXT4 is continuing to move along gracefully in its mature state. With Linux 6.15 there isn't too much to get excited about for this incrementally evolving file-system besides noting it's better hardened now against maliciously-fuzzed file-systems. The EXT4 kernel C driver has some additional safeguards in place for maliciously intended file-system modifications.
Ted Ts'o sums up the highlights in the EXT4 pull request as:
That's it for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle on the EXT4 front.
While Bcachefs is stabilizing its on-disk format and Btrfs adding real-time Zstd compression, EXT4 is continuing to move along gracefully in its mature state. With Linux 6.15 there isn't too much to get excited about for this incrementally evolving file-system besides noting it's better hardened now against maliciously-fuzzed file-systems. The EXT4 kernel C driver has some additional safeguards in place for maliciously intended file-system modifications.
Ted Ts'o sums up the highlights in the EXT4 pull request as:
"* hardening against maliciously fuzzed file systems
* backwards compatibility for the brief period when we attempted to ignore zero-width characters
* avoid potentially BUG'ing if there is a file system corruption found during the file system unmount
* fix free space reporting by statfs when project quotas are enabled and the free space is less than the remaining project quota
Also improve performance when replaying a journal with a very large number of revoke records (applicable for Lustre volumes)."
That's it for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle on the EXT4 front.