FS-VERITY Seeing Performance Enhancements With Linux 5.6

FS-VERITY came in Linux 5.4 as a means of transparent integrity and authenticity support for read-only files. This Google creation is seeing better performance with Linux 5.6.

FS-VERITY is similar to the existing Linux dm-verity for authenticity protection but works at the file level rather than block level. FS-VERITY can be used currently with the likes of EXT4 and F2FS file-systems. Google has been working on this native file authenticity support for use on Android devices where as in the past they have used dm-verity for verifying system images, among other possible use-cases.

FS-VERITY in Linux 5.6 is seeing better sequential read performance thanks to a readahead implementation for the Merkle tree pages to be read in larger chunks. Meanwhile the FS_IOC_ENABLE_VERITY performance is better thanks to a readahead implementation for data pages. Rounding out the FS-VERITY work for Linux 5.6 is an improvement to avoid possible allocation failures during I/O. More details with this Git merge.

The FS-VERITY presentation above goes over more about this file authentication kernel framework.