Sent out and already merged today for the [1]Linux 7.0 kernel are the [2]EXT4 file-system updates.

One of the changes for EXT4 in this next kernel version that stands out for me is improving write performance when dealing with concurrent direct I/O writes to multiple files. This performance improvement comes by deferring the splitting of unwritten extents to I/O completion.

EXT4 in Linux 7.0 also now avoids unnecessary cache invalidation in the extent status cache, avoids unnecessary forced ordered writes when appending to a file with delayed allocation, and a variety of bug fixes.

Also new in EXT4 for Linux 7.0 is the err_report_sec sysfs attribute to control the error report timer for how frequently to log a warning message over file-system inconsistency being detected. By default the timer will log a warning message every 24 hours but with this error_report_sec sysfs attribute it's easily configurable -- or setting it to zero to disable the timer.

More details on the EXT4 changes for Linux 7.0 via [3]this pull request that landed in Git a short time ago.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.0

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/EXT4

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20260212154721.GA2430983@mit.edu/