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/