EXT4 Sees Some Performance Optimizations, Folio Conversion With Linux 6.4
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On the performance front with Linux 6.4, a linked list for tracking extents that have been used for inode pre-allocation has been replaced by a red-black tree in the multi-block allocator. In turn this should improve the EXT4 performance for workloads with a large number of random allocating writes. Separately there has also been many clean-ups and fixes to the multi-block allocator code.
EXT4 with Linux 6.4 has also cleaned up its "data=journal" write-path that is now "significantly" cleaned-up and simplified. In the process a large number of data=journal special cases in the code were eliminated.
Matthew Wilcox meanwhile converted EXT4's code paths for reading/writing EXT4 pages to make use of the memory folios functionality.
More details on all of the EXT4 changes for Linux 6.4 via this pull request.
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