There have been some experiment with modified XFS using SMR drives natively: https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/smr/HannesReinecke_St

There have been some experiment with modified XFS using SMR drives natively: https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations/smr/HannesReinecke_Strategies_for_running_unmodified_FS_SMR.pdf https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SDC15_presentations... You put the journal and metadata on the continuous part and data on the shingled part, making sure you only ever add to what was written previously in a shingled segment by using copy-on-write. And sporadically you reclaim a segment. This should be much more efficient than a block layer translation layer that knows nothing about the filesystem.