EXT4 vs. XFS vs. Btrfs vs. F2FS With Linux 4.15 Comparing KPTI/Retpoline

With FS-Mark there was a very noticeable drop with the XFS file-system with KPTI and Retpoline enabled while EXT4 saw the second largest drop while Btrfs and F2FS interestingly saw less degradation from the overhead of Retpolines and Kernel Page Table Isolation.

With the BlogBench write test, XFS saw the largest drop in performance from enabling these security features while EXT4 remained the front-runner with it and F2FS and Btrfs seeing smaller drops in performance.

With Dbench as well, XFS sees the largest drop in performance from KPTI and Retpoline support.

As well as with the IOzone write test.

With the CompileBench test, F2FS remains the fastest with EXT4, XFS, and F2FS seeing measurable drops in performance but the default Btrfs configuration was the slowest and did not see degraded performance from these new kernel features.