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Linux 6.17 Will Allow Writing Zeroes More Efficiently To SSDs
In addition to the VFS changes merrged yesterday for allowing multi-device file-systems to better cope with losing a disk, another notable change as part of the VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 allows more efficiently zeroing out a range on modern NVMe SSDs or SCSI drives.
At the moment, the only method to avoid this is to create an empty file and write zero data into it (for example, using 'dd' with a large block size). This series implements the BLK_FEAT_WRITE_ZEROES_UNMAP feature and BLK_FLAG_WRITE_ZEROES_UNMAP_DISABLED flag for SCSI, NVMe and device-mapper drivers, and add the FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES and STATX_ATTR_WRITE_ZEROES_UNMAP support for ext4 and raw bdev devices. This flag is beneficial for subsequent pure overwriting within this range, as it can save on block allocation and, consequently, significant metadata changes."
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