A set of patches sent out today for testing allow for faster truncating on the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) that can yield around a 54% speed-up for deleting files.

Yi Sun with Unisoc sent out the two patches for speeding up F2FS truncate handling due to deleting large files being time consuming for this file-system. The performance impact from this F2FS optimization work is clear:

If some blocks are continuous and belong to the same segment, we can process these blocks at the same time. This can reduce

the number of calls to the down_write() and the up_write(), thereby improving the overall speed of doing truncate.

Test steps:

Set the CPU and DDR frequencies to the maximum.

dd if=/dev/random of=./test.txt bs=1M count=100000

sync

rm test.txt

Time Comparison of rm:

original optimization ratio

7.17s 3.27s 54.39%

Currently [1]the patches are marked as request for comments (RFC) but hopefully everything will pan out and this optimization work will be picked up for speeding up file deletion on F2FS.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241016052758.3400359-1-yi.sun@unisoc.com/