Version
1.85.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes in the release
include support for async closures, some convenience iterators for tuples,
and a number of stabilized APIs. The headline feature, though, is that
this release stabilizes the Rust 2024
edition, described as “the largest edition we have released“.
The 2024
edition guide has a detailed listing of all the changes that were
incorporated this time around.

The maximum filesystem block size that the kernel can support has always
been limited by the host page size for Linux, even if the filesystems could
handle larger block sizes. The large-block-size (LBS) patches that were merged
for the 6.12 kernel removed this limitation in XFS, thereby decoupling
the page size from the filesystem block size. XFS is the first filesystem
to gain this support, with other filesystems likely to add LBS support in
the future. In addition, the LBS patches have been used to get the initial atomic-write support into XFS.

Atomic block writes, which have been discussed here a
few times in the past, are block operations that either complete fully or
do not occur at all, ensuring data consistency and preventing partial (or
“torn”) writes. This means the disk will, at all times, contain either the
complete new data from the atomic write operation or the complete old data
from a previous write. It will never have a mix of both the old and the new
data, even if a power failure occurs during an ongoing atomic write
operation. Atomic writes have been of interest to many Linux users,
particularly database developers, as this feature can provide significant
performance improvements.