Linux 5.10 FUSE To Allow Faster Performance With VirtIO-FS

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 19 October 2020 at 04:05 PM EDT. 3 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
The FUSE implementation for supporting file-systems in user-space is seeing important kernel work merged for Linux 5.10.

The most prominent change with FUSE in Linux 5.10 is a "DAX" mode for allowing direct access to the host page cache. Making use of this direct access support for the host page cache is the VirtIO-FS file-system for sharing files/folders with virtualized guests.

By allowing direct access to the host page cache, there is no longer any double caching and most I/O operations should be significantly faster.

This big speed-up for VirtIO-FS was previously outlined on Phoronix back in August. Now for Linux 5.10 the VirtIO-FS DAX support is ready to go. But making use of this direct access to the host page cache does require using VirtIO-FS with the "dax" mount option and the FUSE_DAX Kconfig build option.

The FUSE changes for Linux 5.10 also allow now automatic sub-mounting support within VirtIO-FS too. Aside from those VirtIO-FS activities, not much else is going on for FUSE itself with Linux 5.10 given that all the interesting developments largely happen in user-space with the file-systems leveraging it.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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