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.

These patches get large folios working for regular files on EXT4 and this patch series is less invasive than previously posted patches. The patches could be enabled by default if deemed ready.

Testing across a system with hole, RAM disk, and NVMe solid-state storage types, there are very nice improvements to the buffered read performance:

And even more compelling results for EXT4 large folio performance across write performance under a variety of conditions:

Those interested in this large folio work for EXT4 can see this patch series for all the details.