The open-source Linux file-system driver for supporting Microsoft's exFAT now can deliver better sequential read performance with Linux 7.0 thanks to multi-cluster support.

The work previously covered back in December for [1]exFAT on Linux using multi-cluster support and [2]Upcoming exFAT Linux Driver Patch Can Boost Sequential Read Performance By ~10% has been merged for Linux 7.0. This can improve performance by about 10% while also having lower overhead. This multi-cluster/contiguous cluster support can deliver better sequential read performance especially when using small cluster sizes. The 10% improvement is with a 512 byte cluster size.

The exFAT code for Linux 7.0 also optimized consecutive FAT entry reads by caching buffer heads to significantly reduce sb_bread() calls. The exFAT code for Linux 7.0 also improved error code handling and other improvements.

More details on the exFAT improvements merged this weekend for Linux 7.0 via [3]this pull request .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-exFAT-Reads-MC-Map

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/exFAT-Faster-Seq-Reads-10p

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAKYAXd-GBqxgaaFDMg_1Qz2Qa9VAbyuiZxs=HYtoP7OHh4zRFg@mail.gmail.com/