Btrfs With Linux 5.16 Seeing More Performance Optimizations, NVMe ZNS

The Btrfs file-system continues seeing new performance optimizations and other work, thanks in part to the renewed interest around the file-system with Fedora Workstation continuing to use it by default along with openSUSE and other Linux distributions.

On the busy first day of the Linux 5.16 merge window the Btrfs changes were submitted by maintainer David Sterba of SUSE. There are performance improvements, some new feature work, and the usual assortment of fixes and code maintenance.

Btrfs with this new kernel continues seeing various performance optimizations. Logging improvements should yield around a 3% throughput improvement and up to 11% lower latency on a sample Dbench workload. There is also more efficient directory logging, speeding up of bulk insertions that can lead to lower bulk creation run time requirements and deletion time.

Btrfs in Linux 5.16 also has support for defragmentation with sub-pages, compression write for sub-pages, support for ZNS (Zoned Namespaces) as part of the Btrfs' zoned mode support, prep work for send protocol updates, error handling improvements, and various fixes. ZNS is the NVMe specification around zoned namespaces for SSDs.

The full list of Btrfs changes for Linux 5.16 via this pull request.