SaunaFS 5.6.0

[uristdwarf]

This is mostly a routine update, with one exception. It should have been out way earlier (again), however due to various problems with the CI/CD pipeline it took much longer than expected. Hopefully the next release will be out during the middle of this month (though because of the aforementioned issues with CI/CD, we found a regression in dev branch regarding uraft and are investigating it currently, so we are delaying the release candidate for this until we figure out what happened)

The one exception is experimental mTLS for client. Right now clients can optionally connect with master through mTLS when both are setup properly in their configuration. But there's no way to enforce it currently (because important tools do not work yet with mTLS, like monitoring and saunafs CLI). Still, we appreciate any testing and reporting any issues you find with the current implementation. As it's an experimental feature, everything is subject to change pending final stabilization. And as usual, existing SaunaFS users should not be affected by this and it will remain completely optional)

Other developments

In other news, The Debian FTP Masters have accepted SaunaFS 5.1.2 into sid. Barring any critical issues, it will appear in debian testing in a few days. It will also likely (though not confirmed) appear as a package in Ubuntu 26.04.

Breaking change policy update

We try to be extremely careful about not breaking existing behavior of the filesystem. This includes things like changing default settings. However, some time ago we introduced a default configuration change on the client side regarding read-ahead settings, which we thought would overall improve performance on most clients. We have had no problems reported since then.

So starting from now, changes to default settings that try to improve the overall performance of the filesystem will not be considered breaking changes. However, if there is a significant amount of users experiencing problems because of the changes, we will revert to the previous default settings in a patch.

This should hopefully allow us to better improve the performance of the client for most users. We will always have the option for versions in the same major release (e.g 5.x.x) to use the previous settings.

That's all from us, thank you for using SaunaFS!

• The Leil Storage team