Coding
Linux 7.4 adds Apple M4 NVMe support in its block pull
Linux 7.4's block pull adds a driver for the Apple M4's ANS2 NVMe controller, plus 33 fixes for an old Mac floppy driver tested on four classic Macs.
Filesystems news and analysis
Filesystems decide how files are stored on a disk. Coverage includes Btrfs fixes and a GNOME tool for Btrfs snapshots (saved copies you can roll back to), faster LZ4 decompression in Linux, and the kernel dropping old formats like BFS.
Coding
Linux 7.4 makes idle workqueue flushes up to 100x faster
Linux 7.4 merges a workqueue fix that took idle flushes on a 192-CPU server from 40,000 to 4.2 million a second. Busy flushes can be 15-20% slower.
Coding
Torvalds' page cache patch reworked: 4.5x faster on ext4
Meta's Kiryl Shutsemau turned Torvalds' page cache patch into an 18-patch RFC. 64 threads on ext4 rose from about 15M to 70M small reads a second.
Coding
BeamFS RFC: a Reed-Solomon file system for Linux
BeamFS, an 18-patch Linux RFC, stores every block as Reed-Solomon codewords so it can repair flipped bits on a single disk, at a cost of 7% of the space.
Coding
Linux 7.3 released with fchroot, failfs and faster Btrfs
Linus Torvalds released Linux 7.3 on October 18, 2026: 18,765 commits from 3,021 developers, new sandboxing tools and Btrfs fsync up to 5x faster.
Coding
MeshXFS: an AI-written clustered file system built on XFS
MeshXFS 0.90.130 turns XFS into a clustered file system, released for up to 16 nodes. AI agents wrote its clustering code, with no line-by-line human review.
Dev Stack
TrueNAS 27 RC.1 ships with Linux 6.18 and OpenZFS 2.4
TrueNAS 27 RC.1 arrived October 5 with OpenZFS 2.4, up to 25% faster dedup writes and full LXC containers. The stable release is due in early December.
Coding
Linux LZ4 resync to v1.10.0 lifts decompression up to 21%
A 9-patch series moves the kernel's 2017-2018 LZ4 code to upstream v1.10.0, adds bounds checks and speeds 16K-block decompression by 21%.
Dev Stack
Wisp brings graphical Btrfs snapshot management to GNOME
Wisp, a new GNOME Shell extension for GNOME 46 to 50, lets you take, browse, and roll back Btrfs snapshots with clicks instead of terminal commands.
Coding
Linux 7.3 Btrfs fixes filesystem IDs and grub2 boot
A Btrfs change in Linux 7.2-rc1 made filesystem IDs unstable and broke OpenConnect key derivation. The fix touches 10 files.
Coding
Linux 7.4 removes BFS, the UnixWare boot file system
A patch deleting 1,275 lines of BFS support is queued for Linux 7.4, one kernel cycle after EFS and FreeVxFS were dropped for the same reason.
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