With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts'o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11. He explained in that [1]pull request :

"Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature. Also some performance improvements; in particular, improving IOPS and throughput on fast devices running Async Direct I/O by up to 20% by optimizing jbd2_transaction_committed()."

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations. Indeed the patch from Huawei's Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It's great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240718032730.GA2319255@mit.edu/