Linux 4.14 File-System Benchmarks: Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, XFS

With BlogBench's write test is where EXT4 shines.

While running six Dbench clients, XFS leads but it did drop in Linux 4.14 as well as F2FS. Btrfs meanwhile on Linux 4.14 was faster in this case.

Tiobench / Threaded I/O Tester saw only some minor bumps along the testing process.

With CompileBench there were some fluctuations in the resutls but when comparing 4.12 to 4.14, there isn't any real changes to report.

So overall, Linux 4.14 doesn't bring any broad changes in file-system/disk performance, at least with the SATA 3.0 SSD testing carried out so far. Arguably the biggest file-system change in Linux 4.14 is the addition of Zstd compression support for Btrfs and SquashFS. At least for Linux 4.15 things should be more exciting with XFS having "scads of new stuff" (https://www.phoronix.com/news/XFS-Linux-4.15-Changes), EXT4 online resizing with bigalloc, Btrfs compression improvements, F2FS enhancements, etc. Benchmarks of Linux 4.15 in due time.

If you are interested in more XFS vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. Btrfs battles, see this week's Intel Optane 900P Linux file-system comparison for this ultra-fast NVMe 3D XPoint SSD storage.