After the Linux 4.14 merge window is over, I'll begin with a lot of fresh Linux kernel benchmarks from this in-development release. But I/O and EXT4 changes already have me running some preliminary tests.

With EXT4 are some scalability improvements to note. The scalability improvements around allocating inodes may help in some workloads. I received a report of this patch on a consumer SSD helping out the Phoronix Test Suite's BlogBench. There's also been some talk of other performance changes to find in Linux 4.14.

So far I've had time to run a Linux 4.14 test kernel from yesterday compared to Linux 4.13 stable on a Core i9 7900X system with Corsair Force MP500 NVMe 240GB SSD.

The results ended up being much more mixed than expected:






More data can be found via this result file while more kernel tests from a wider range of systems is in the works. This cycle should also be fun for I/O benchmarking thanks to BFQ/CFQ improvements and the Btrfs Zstd compression support, among other changes.