KDE Frameworks 5.53 Will Have An Important KIO Performance Fix

With KDE Frameworks 5.53 due out in December there is a significant performance fix in the KIO slaves code.

In this week's round-up of KDE usability and productivity work, there is a lot of bug fixing and other UI refinements going on... No standout features over the past week, but one of the fixes did catch my attention: improving the performance of KIO that is used by Dolphin and other KDE programs for dealing with I/O across various protocols/formats.

It turns out from the transition of the KDE 4 Software Compilation to KDE Frameworks 5, a build system mix-up caused for the kioslaves code to always be built without sendfile support. The SENDFILE system call as a reminder is about copying data between two file descriptors as a more efficient approach than using read() and write() due to the roundtrip to/from user-space needed with that traditional approach. While the SENDFILE system call has been widely supported on Linux for a long time, the build system issue led to the support not being enabled in the KDE Frameworks 5 code.

So the fix is in there now for KDE Frameworks 5.53 to re-enable this "massive optimization" for KIO.