Linux 3.12 Kernel To Bring Faster File-Systems

Starting with the Flexible I/O Tester, only for the XFS file-system was there any performance improvement in Linux 3.12 Git over Linux 3.11 stable. The other three file-systems didn't see any performance change for FIO on the Intel SSD. The fastest file-system overall for this workload continued to be EXT4 when using stock mount options.

With the first FS-Mark test, the EXT4 and XFS file-systems saw nice rises in performance out of the Linux 3.12 kernel over 3.11. There may also be some more subtle performance increases too for Btrfs and F2FS but there was some noise in the results. The fastest overall file-system here was Samsung's Flash-Friendly File-System.

When dealing with FS-Mark across multiple threads, EXT4 was more competitive with F2FS. There also wasn't the performance increases on Linux 3.12 as we found when running a single FS-Mark thread.