Krisman: Using the Linux kernel's Case-insensitive feature in Ext4

On the Collabora blog, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi writes about a feature he developed: case-insensitive ext4. He describes how to enable the feature in the kernel (>= 5.2), how to create an ext4 filesystem that will support case-insensitive lookups, as well as some gotchas; he starts with some justification for the idea: "A file name is a text string used to uniquely identify a file (in this context, 'directory' is the same as a file) at a specific level of the directory hierarchy. While, from the operating system point of view, it doesn't matter what the file name is, as long as it is unique, meaningful file names are essential for the end user, since it is the main key to locate and retrieve data. In other words, a meaningful file name is what people rely upon to find their valuable documents, pictures and spreadsheets.Traditionally, Linux (and Unix) filesystems have always considered file names as an opaque byte sequence without any special meaning, requiring users to submit the exact match of the file to find it in the filesystem. But that is not how humans operate. When people write titles, 'important report.ods' and 'IMPORTANT REPORT.ods' usually mean the same piece of data, and you don't care how it was written when creating it. We care about the content and the semantics of the words IMPORTANT and REPORT."