ZFS File-System Tests On The Linux 3.10 Kernel

Using the latest ZFS On Linux support, the ZFS file-system was benchmarked from the Linux 3.10 stable kernel and compared to the Linux file-system competition.

After carrying out new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks on the Linux 3.10 kernel using newly-released patches for this questionable file-system, I proceeded to run some new tests of the native ZFS implementation for Linux: ZFSOnLinux.org. The latest Ubuntu Sancy PPA for ZFSOnLinux has Linux 3.10 kernel compatibility, which was used for benchmarking with the stock ZFS mount options. This is the native ZFS file-system implemented as a Linux kernel module and not to be confused with the ZFS FUSE solution that's also available but is implemented from user-space.

For this quick, one-page weekend article, ZFS tests were done just from a single-disk SSD system. The comparison file-systems were EXT4 and Btrfs, which were also tested using their stock 3.10 mount options. A larger, multi-page article will come next week that features a comparison of ten different Linux file-systems -- including ZFS and Reiser4 -- so stay tuned for that more exhaustive testing.

The benchmark results in full along with all of the system hardware/software details are hosted on OpenBenchmarking.org in 1308038-SO-ZFSLINUX328.