News: 0001583216

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Linux 6.18 exFAT Driver Lands An Enticing Optimization

([Linux Storage] 6 Hours Ago exFAT)


In addition to [1]the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle.

Microsoft's exFAT as their file-system choice for USB flash drives, SD cards, and other flash media continues seeing improvements for its Linux driver support. One improvement that stands out with exFAT in Linux 6.18 is to optimize the allocation bitmap loading time. This is the enhancement previously covered on Phoronix one month ago that can [2]lead to a ~16.5x speed-up for loading time . This change is particularly beneficial for large partitions with small cluster sizes.

In addition to that big loading time improvement, exFAT now supports the FS_IOC_GETFSLABEL and FS_IOC_SETFSLABEL ioctls for getting/setting the file-system label, support for changing the discard / zero_size_dir / errors mount options via remount handling, and a few other patches to enhance the code.

More details on these merged exFAT changes for Linux 6.18 via [3]this pull .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-EXT4-EROFS-NTFS3

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/exFAT-Optimize-Bitmap-Loading

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAKYAXd8XfKPTdDMbHKkyQN1FTGLmgKkMTkUiSOuHE=FjB=G==w@mail.gmail.com/


While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to
his assistant and whispered, "Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?"
"Why the sea is salt?" whispered back the assistant. "What do you
mean?"
The director continued: "When I was a little kid, I heard the story of
`Why the sea is salt' many times, but I never thought it important until just
a moment ago. It's something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and
salt was rare and expensive. A miller received from a wizard a wonderful
machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long. At first the miller
thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages
had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding
more salt. The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his
acres. At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and
be rid of it. But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine
were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that's
why the sea is salt."
"I don't get you," said the assistant.
-- Guy Endore, "Men of Iron"