Btrfs With Linux 5.14 Has More Performance Tuning, Other Improvements

With Btrfs continuing to see new adoption by various enterprises, Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation/Cloud and SUSE/openSUSE embracing it, and there continuing to be nice upstream improvements to this file-system driver, Btrfs continues on a nice trajectory in 2021.

Sent in on Monday were the main set of feature updates for the Btrfs file-system code with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel. There isn't anything revolutionary with this pull request but just a pleasant assortment of various fixes and improvements for this "next-generation" Linux file-system.

Highlights of Btrfs for Linux 5.14 include:

- Avoiding a full sync when truncation does not touch extents, which can reduce run-times by 12%.

- Btrfs will also now avoid unnecessary logging of extended attributes during fast fsyncs, for around 17% greater throughput and 17% lower run-time on xattr stress workloads.

- A sysfs control to limit scrubbing I/O bandwidth per-device.

- Exporting device statistics via sysfs at /sys/fs/btrfs/FSID/devinfo/DEVID/error_stats.

- New ioctls for cancellable resize and device delete.

- Preemptive flushing improvements.

- Preparations around sub-page blocksize handling.

More details on the Btrfs changes to find with Linux 5.14 via this pull request.