There is a lot of exciting file-system changes landing for the Linux 6.16 kernel... [1]EXT4 brings a "really stupendous performance" change , [2]Btrfs also brings some performance improvements , [3]XFS landed atomic writes , and [4]Bcachefs continues stabilizing . For the EROFS read-only file-system its changes have been merged and includes support for Intel QAT acceleration.

The headline [5]EROFS change for Linux 6.16 is adding support for leveraging Intel QuickAssist (QAT) accelerators for improving DEFLATE decompression performance of compressed read-only file-systems for servers and with EROFS finding use in recent years among containers. EROFS maintainer Gao Xiang explained of the Intel QAT support:

"In this cycle, Intel QAT hardware accelerators are supported to improve DEFLATE decompression performance. I've also tested it with the enwik9 dataset of 1 MiB pclusters on our Intel Sapphire Rapids bare-metal server and a PL0 ESSD, and the sequential read performance even surpasses LZ4 software decompression on this setup."

Intel QAT accelerators are built-in to Xeon Scalable processors since Sapphire Rapids.

The Intel QAT support for faster DEFLATE with EROFS was merged as part of [6]this pull request for Linux 6.16.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-EXT4-Performance

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Btrfs-Performance

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Atomic-Writes-Linux-6.16

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Bcachefs

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/search/EROFS

[6] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/aDPu%2Fjffhb499L49@debian/