Testing The "Pretty Beefy" Btrfs Changes In Linux 3.2

Among many other enhancements and alterations, the Linux 3.2 kernel, the Btrfs file-system has some "pretty beefy" changes. Btrfs in Linux 3.2 merges in some long-standing Btrfs branches with new capabilities.

As mentioned in the original Phoronix posting about the next-generation file-system in this next kernel release, "among the noteworthy changes to Btrfs in Linux 3.2 compared to Linux 3.1 are many clean-ups and optimizations, scrubber improvements (including performance improvements), error handling fixes, and improved recovery support." In this article are the first benchmarks of the Btrfs file-system under the Linux 3.2 development kernel.

This first set of file-system tests under the Linux 3.2 kernel is comparing the Btrfs performance of Linux 3.2 to that of the 3.1 and 3.0 kernels on a solid-state drive (SSD). As the Linux 3.2 kernel nears its final release, more tests will come -- including looking at the performance relative to EXT4 and how Btrfs is working on a traditional hard drive with its various mount options (LZO compression, space cache, Gzip compression, and SSD optimizations), etc.

The system was comprised of an Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit installation on a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 160GB Intel SSDSA2M160. Testing of the three latest Linux vanilla kernels were done with the stock Btrfs mount options.