[f2fs-dev] Which kind of devices would benefit of f2fs?

[Didier Spaier <didier@slint.fr>]

Hello,

I plan to provide a more "newbie friendly" installer for the Slint Linux
distribution that I maintain.

It will include an "auto" feature intended for newbies, that will
partition a whole drive and install filesystems with a minimum of user
input. It would install ext4 file systems in case of hard drives (but
the ESP and the Bios Boot partition, that is), or f2fs when
appropriate, without asking.

I am trying to determine for which kinds of devices f2fs should be
preferred over ext4 (or maybe xfs, I have yet to choose)

I understand that I should target devices equipped of a NAND flash
memory and interfaced with a FTL.

I think that nowadays most devices of types eMMC, SSD (both SATA and
PCIe connected, aka NVMe), SD card and flash drives (aka USB sticks)
have these characteristics thus are good candidates for f2fs.

Simply put, that loks like "everything but hard drives".

Is this correct?

If yes, I could just check the value of
/sys/block/<device name>/queue/rotational or the ROTA field of lsblk.

However, I understand that not all flash drives and SSD are based on
NAND and not all these devices interfaced through a NTL.

Thus my questions are:
1. Is the assumption "all devices but hards disks" are potential
candidate for using f2fs valid?
2. If this assumption is not valid, what are the drawbacks using f2fs
for all, in terms of performances and security?
3. Is there a way to tell for a given device if it would benefit of
using f2fs, that could be implemented in a distribution installer,
without human intervention?

Thanks for any clue. and if this is the wrong list for such questions,
please tell me where I should ask them.

Best regards,

Didier

PS I ship currently a kernel 4.19.x. Is this OK?


_______________________________________________
Linux-f2fs-devel mailing list
Linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linux-f2fs-devel