Large Folio Patches For EXT4 Show Some Nice Performance Gains

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Large Folio Patches For EXT4 Show Some Nice Performance Gains

Huawei engineer Zhang Yi posted a set of nine patches today for enabling large folio support for regular files with the EXT4 file-system. These patches enable large folios for EXT4 on regular files except when using FSVERITY, FSCRYPT, or the journaled data mode. Long story short, these large folio patches can deliver some nice performance gains for both reads and writes...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/EXT4-Large-Folios-Performance

[dayone]

EXT4 Masterrace, never obsolete always improving.

[lhilden]

It would be nice if the article gave me a clue as to whatever the hell large folios are.

[davidbepo]

thats some rather nice improvement, hopefully this lands and gets enabled soon

[Jonjolt]

It would be nice if the article gave me a clue as to whatever the hell large folios are.

I had the same question, what are folios anyway? https://lwn.net/Articles/973565/

[Anux]

It would be nice if the article gave me a clue as to whatever the hell large folios are.

In kernel memory management folios are a collection of pages, so I would assume it is something like that for file systems/disk space.

I had the same question, what are folios anyway? https://lwn.net/Articles/973565/

Well you beat me to it, thx.

[edxposed]

Combined with other optimizations in 6.12/6.13, this will allow ext4 to utilize THP for free.

[Eumaios]

This is available only when not using journaling? But I understand that journaling is a basic safety or reliability feature that one shouldn't turn off . . .

[skeevy420]

For now, a folio is still defined as "the first page of a compound page".

A compound page is simply a grouping of two or more physically contiguous pages into a unit that can, in many ways, be treated as a single, larger page.

A roll of TP would then be a compound page. That means that a folio is the first sheet on a roll of TP for your bunghole.

Are you threatening me?

[erniv2]

Stupid question why does Btrfs not have this but bcachefs has it.