News: 0001564903

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

EROFS Metadata Compression Lands Plus A ~2.5x Speedup For Reading Directories

([Linux Storage] 6 Hours Ago EROFS)


Merged on Monday were the EROFS file-system updates for Linux 6.17. EROFS continues to be a common read-only file-system choice for some mobile/embedded devices as well as container use-cases.

As part of the merged EROFS code for Linux 6.17 is now [1]supporting metadata compression for even smaller read-only file-system images. EROFS metadata compression is now in place for scoring even smaller image sizes but at the cost of higher I/O latency. There is though support for using different compression algorithms / compression levels if still desiring decent performance with less dramatic space savings.

The EROFS updates for Linux 6.17 also include a separate performance improvement. EROFS now supports readahead for directories in the readdir function to improve performance when reading directories. The patch adding this support noted that the readdir test on a large directory with 12,000 sub-files went from handling 926,385 files per second to 2,380,435.. Or about a 2.5x improvement.

See the [2]EROFS pull request for more details on these changes merged for Linux 6.17.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/EROFS-Metadata-Compression

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/aIblpKzSWEEYwQ06@debian/



phoronix

Could You Get Fired for Visiting Slashdot?

PADUCAH, KY -- Matt Johnson, an employee at Paradigm Shift Consulting, Inc.,
was fired from his programming job because of his addiction to Slashdot.
Johnson typically visited Slashdot several times a day during working hours.
Citing productivity problems, Johnson's boss gave him the pink slip and
instituted a 'NoDot' policy -- no visiting Slashdot or related sites from the
office, ever. Now Johnson has filed a lawsuit, claiming that his Slashdot
addiction is protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Matt Johnson explained, "They discriminated against me because I'm a Dothead.
Drug abuse and alcoholism are often considered handicaps. Why not Slashdot
addiction?" Johnson's boss sees the situation differently. "Matt never got
any work done. He was always visiting Slashdot, Freshmeat, or some other
nerd website. And when he wasn't, he suffered withdrawl symptoms and
couldn't think straight. A few months ago he spent eight consecutive hours
posting comments in a KDE vs. GNOME flame war. I tried to offer assistance
to overcome his addiction, but he refused. Enough is enough."

The company's 'NoDot' policy has been under fire as well. One anonymous
employee said, "We can't visit Slashdot because of Matt's addiction. This
just sucks. I really don't see anything wrong with visiting Slashdot during
breaks or after hours."