EXT4 For Linux 4.6 Brings Some Scalability & Performance Improvements

The EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 4.6 kernel are varied, but there are some notable enhancements.

With today's EXT4 pull request for the Linux 4.6 merge window, the EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts'o describes the changes as "Performance improvements in SEEK_DATA and xattr scalability improvements, plus a lot of clean ups and bug fixes."

There are just under 40 changes to the EXT4 file-system module that contain 1,150 insertions and 1,518 deletions. Overall, this isn't too exciting of an update for this mature and commonly used Linux file-system, but at least there's the aforementioned optimizations in the area of SEEK_DATA and xattr.