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Implementing Case-insensitive File Systems in the Linux Kernel - André Almeida, Igalia
Despite being a controversial topic on Linux, case-insensitive file systems are very common on platforms like Windows, MacOS and even Android, so naturally people have been wondering for a long time if Linux should support them or not. After XFS added partial support for case insensitivity, restricted to ASCII names, the first mainline Linux filesystem to get full support for case insensitivity with Unicode was ext4 in 2018, decades after other platforms. After ext4, several other file systems have implemented this feature, such as f2fs, bcachefs, tmpfs, while others have it on their roadmap.
In this talk, we are going to dive into why this topic is so controversial, what are the technical challenges on having this feature working properly, how to add support for it to a new filesystem and what are the proposals for its future.