EXT4 Still Leads Over Btrfs File-System On Linux 3.8

With the final release of the Linux 3.8 kernel coming in the very near future, here are file-system benchmarks of EXT4 and Btrfs on the Linux 3.8 development code compared to recent Linux kernel releases.

Coming separately will be our first benchmarks of the new F2FS file-system while the tests in this article are just looking at EXT4 and Btrfs. In terms of the file-system changes in 3.8, see EXT4 In Linux 3.8 Brings Inline Data, Seek Hole/Data and Btrfs Gets Improved Performance On Linux 3.8 Kernel.

Both Btrfs and EXT4 were tested in their stock configurations / mount options for this round of testing. A Linux 3.8 kernel from this week was compared to the Linux 3.7 and Linux 3.5 kernels. Unfortunately for this particular test system there was an unrelated (Intel KMS) issue on the Linux 3.6 kernel that led to skipping over that release. The OS state was maintained the same in its stock settings during the course of this benchmarking.

The performance of EXT4 and Btrfs really hasn't evolved too much with the Linux 3.8 kernel at least as it pertains to using an Intel SSD with an Intel Core i5 processor from Ubuntu 13.04, but the Linux file-system performance results are on the following pages.