Earlier this month were various [1]Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some [2]premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

[3]

Due to each round of file-system benchmarks taking hours, Linux 6.12 LTS was the cut-off for this comparison since that already stretches to November 2024 and was that year's Long Term Support kernel. Just EXT4 and XFS are being looked at today while a separate article is still being worked on for a similar comparison with the Btrfs file-system performance over succeeding kernels.

[4]

XFS and EXT4 were tested each time with its default mount options and using the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for all of the tested kernel builds for easy reproducibility.

A [5]Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD (SB5PH27X038T) was used for testing the file-systems on each of these Linux kernel versions. This Solidigm PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD was running on a server build with the [6]AMD EPYC 9745 128-Core Zen 5 CPU, [7]Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 motherboard, and 12 x 64GB DDR5 memory. An Ubuntu 26.04 development snapshot with all its latest packages were running on this AMD EPYC Turin server.

So let's see how EXT4 and XFS upstream file-system performance has evolved roughly over the past year and a half of Linux kernel releases.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/phoronix-premium

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-612-linux-70-xfs-ext4&image=linux_7_ssd_1_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-612-linux-70-xfs-ext4&image=linux_7_ssd_2_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/review/solidigm-d7-ps1010

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-epyc-9745-9755

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/review/gigabyte-mz33-ar1