In addition to [1]the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4.

EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts'o noted that the file-system is improving performance by allowing parallel direct I/O writes where previously were being too conservative when checking if it was safe to avoid requiring an exclusive lock.

There is also better performance of ext4_mb_prefetch() within the multi-block allocator by using fallocate() to avoid work when it's not needed. In addition, improved performance when carrying out an overwrite to an already up-to-date folio.

EXT4 with Linux 7.3 is also bringing some code clean-ups, avoiding possible soft lockups or RCU stall conditions, and a variety of bug fixes.

The full list of these EXT4 feature changes for Linux 7.3 can be found via [2]this pull request .

With all these EXT4 performance improvements plus work on other file-systems like [3]heavy Btrfs improvements will make for some interesting Linux 7.3 file-system benchmarks as the cycle settles down.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/IOmap-Linux-7.3-Faster

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/aoPivgtbvFQk6aYD@mit.edu/

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-Btrfs