Btrfs To Ship Multiple Performance Improvements In The Next Linux Kernel

Adding to the excitement around Linux 4.20~5.0 are now multiple performance improvements to the Btrfs file-system to be presented for this next Linux kernel release.

Btrfs offers a lot of features not readily available by other in-tree Linux file-systems, but even with all of the features like SSD optimizations, its performance hasn't been all that staggering (in part because, yes, it is copy-on-write by default that does hurt some workloads). But come Linux 4.20~5.0, there should be multiple speed-ups to Btrfs.

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for this new kernel merge window. Besides the usual churn of fixes are "nice performance improvements" affecting a range of benchmarks and multi-threaded workloads to help those I/O benchmark numbers as well as needing fewer context switches and overall better memory allocation characteristics.

The Btrfs speed boosts come from eliminating some blocking code, qgroups improvements, and other low-level changes.

Btrfs users curious about the dozens of changes for this next kernel version can find the details via this pull request. Yes, I'll soon be running some fresh Btrfs file-system benchmarks.