With [1]the Btrfs pull request for Linux 7.3 having delivered more performance optimizations with some ~3x and ~5x gains mentioned in specific areas, I was eager to test out the new Btrfs performance on the in-development kernel. In today's article are some benchmarks of Btrfs on [2]Linux 7.2 stable compared to [3]Linux 7.3 Git with some very enticing performance gains confirmed in various workloads.

[4]

Btrfs with Linux 7.3 now uses an IOmap bounce buffer for direct I/O rather than falling back to buffered I/O, replaces XArray usage with local LRU lists for tracking inhibited extent buffers, skipping hole detection for full fsync for files without holes and many extents, reduced locking around the extent readahead, and enhancing extent buffer allocation modes. Plus there are other optimizations and fixes too with this new Btrfs code for Linux 7.3.

With today's benchmarking I tested Linux 7.2 stable against Linux 7.3 Git as of 23 August. Btrfs was freshly formatted each time and mounted using its stock mount options on the test system, which was an HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by an Intel Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor and using the secondary Sandisk SN8000S SDEPNRG-2T00-1006 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD for the Btrfs testing.

In the coming days will also be Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 benchmarks across EXT4 / XFS / F2FS / Btrfs as those mainline prominent file-system tests wrapped up while Btrfs was done first and the results exciting enough to feature on their own.



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

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.2

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+7.3

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-73-btrfs&image=linux_73_btrfs_lrg