Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

Book of Phoronix, Sony 5:19

In the beginning the surface was formless and empty.
A engineer said let there be many lights and fast lights.
And it was fast and it was good.

Even though micro$oft said there was a great love of Linux,
we did not see the blood spilt.

Yet from sony it was like a lost son gave much blood and
the Love of Linux flowed much.

[castlefox]

That would be up for the Android project/vendors to do themselves. Mainline LTS doesn't go as far back and actively discourage using such old kernels, so it's not gonna happen on their side.

Google/Android is starting an initiative for OEMs launching with Android 12(+), to use Generic Kernel Image (GKI). Getting that to all the phones out in the wild will be a multi-year process. But it will help a lot with fragmentation & easing the android update pain.

[dacbarbos]

I never used that filesystem to be honest. What are its advantages? It's open source? It comes from Microsoft, right?

Ofc, it really depends on one's use case. Check my old blog post. I'd say is probably the best FS choice for SD/microSD cards.

[xnor]

That percentage figure is strangely inverted and not intuitive at all. I'd be saying it's four times faster!

Yeah you have to read it like this: 73.8% of the time required before got cut through the patch. It's literally the relative improvement of time, where 0% would be no change at all and 100% would mean the operation takes no time anymore.

You're thinking about it in terms of operations per second which in the 64 KByte case would be like 3.82x or +282%.

[AndyChow]

That's good too, but I have to save it somewhere as I will not remember it.
Thank you!

One person mentioned the --help flag, but there's also the man pages. "man mkfs.exfat" works, but also works for config file like "man fstab". It's good to look up the --help or man page rather than notes or help online, since the variables might have changed from kernel versions.

Most people know the man pages can be used to get info on programs, but I didn't learn until embarrassingly recently that it has all (most) config file details too.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I never used that filesystem to be honest. What are its advantages? It's open source? It comes from Microsoft, right?

Are you sure you've never used it? Basically every SD / microSD, and USB flash drive has come formatted with this filesystem for ages. Unless you specifically go out of your way to reformat them, there's a good chance many people have used it and not even known. E.g. they pulled some new new SD card out of its package and put it in a digital camera over a decade ago.

[microcode]

Also I think the 73% is only measured in an extreme case where you use a small blocksize, mount using dirsync and create a lot of directories...

It's not going to do much for the average Joe..

If you look at the table, the improvement is greater for larger cluster sizes, not the other way around. Also no mention of block size here.

The test is extreme but that's no excuse not to read the relatively short bit of text about it.

[edwaleni]

From Sony.... hmmm... hope it is carefully scanned for hidden root kits.

This guy is an engineer in the DSLR division. The rootkit you speak of came out of the music group.

Completely different parts of the company.

[dwagner]

From Sony.... hmmm... hope it is carefully scanned for hidden root kits.

[sinepgib]

Very nice, but if its going to be used on 5.19 it will not affect a lot of mobiles. Most likely they have to backport it down to...3.x? or 4.19? dont know which one is currently used for Android phones. But usually its quite old old long long stable.

That would be up for the Android project/vendors to do themselves. Mainline LTS doesn't go as far back and actively discourage using such old kernels, so it's not gonna happen on their side.