File-System Benchmarks With The Linux 2.6.34 Kernel

File-system benchmarks have become quite common to Phoronix in the age of EXT4 and Btrfs with these new file-systems driving much of the interest and as we have also been finding the Linux file-system performance to change between kernel releases (and in some cases, the performance has changed a great deal). Most recently we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs vs. Reiser4, but now a month later we are back with more Linux file-system benchmarks as we look to see if the disk performance has changed with the Linux 2.6.34 kernel.

This time around we are using a Git snapshot of the Linux 2.6.34 kernel right before the 2.6.34-rc4 release was tagged. We tested the EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS file-systems this time around. For the disk benchmarks through the Phoronix Test Suite we used Compile Bench, FS-Mark, Dbench, IOzone, PostMark, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Unpack-Linux, and the Threaded I/O Tester.

Our test system for this file-system testing atop the Linux 2.6.34 kernel was comprised of an AMD Opteron 2384 quad-core Shanghai processor clocked at 2.70GHz, Tyan S2927 n3600B motherboard, a 64GB OCZ Agility EX SSD, and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. On the software side was the Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit Beta, the previously mentioned Linux 2.6.34 snapshot, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-radeon 6.13.0, and GCC 4.4.3. Each file-system was mounted with its default mount options.

Our first test was Compile Bench with its initial create process. The still-in-testing Btrfs file-system scored a first place finish and was 23% faster than the second-fastest file-system, EXT3. EXT3 in turn was 22% faster than the EXT4 successor, but out in a distant last place was the XFS file-system with a speed of 10.83MB/s, compared to 64.47MB/s for Btrfs.