12mo ago

EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11 (Phoronix)

www.phoronix.com

EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11

Ted Ts'o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11. He explained in that pull request:

"Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature. Also some performance improvements; in particular, improving IOPS and throughput on fast devices running Async Direct I/O by up to 20% by optimizing jbd2_transaction_committed()."

57 comments

Wow my favorite FS is still being developed. Nice
- Mine too. I could not bring myself to adopt a new or different FS at the moment. I wonder what "fast devices" and "slow" in this context means.
  
  NVME SSDs vs HDDs, perhaps?
- Fedora people would say that BTRFS is better because it allows maintenance that EXT4 doesnt even have :)
  
  I really like the idea of BTRFS and what it can do. For my recent system, build in end of 2023 (not a year ago) I really thought about and compared the systems, but end up using EXT4. Here some thoughts I had:
  I want to use BTRFS as my main system FS, but I wasn't sure which alternative FS to use (there are other contenders too), if I need the extra functionality, if its 100% stable for me on a non Fedora system and I also did not want to spent the time learning and experimenting with it, yet. But I will. And if other distributions I install or boot into would work well with BTRFS, if they are not on the newest Kernel yet.
  
  Tumbleweed people like me would say it's a great filesystem because it enables snapper to work effortlessly.
  
  i'm using fedora on ext4 lol, the single unavoidable problem with BTRFS is that i'd have to switch to it :P
  
  I dislike Fedora anyways.
- I understand ext4 being dependable, but favorite? I'm curious what makes it your favorite.
  
  Is dependable not a good enough reason to be someone's favorite?
  
  It's stable and well refined. Imo these are the most important things for a file system.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it's not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there's still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover... With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.
Ted Ts'o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.
He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.
Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.
Indeed the patch from Huawei's Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:
It's great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.
The original article contains 144 words, the summary contains 120 words. Saved 17%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Huge news 🎉 Thanks OP for sharing.
It feels like a relief after reading earlier Lemmy comments in other posts about btrfs vs ext4 and having read this Wikipedia page paragraph :
In 2008, the principal developer of the ext3 and ext4 file systems, Theodore Ts'o, stated that although ext4 has improved features, it is not a major advance, it uses old technology, and is a stop-gap. Ts'o believes that Btrfs is the better direction because "it offers improvements in scalability, reliability, and ease of management".[29] Btrfs also has "a number of the same design ideas that reiser3/4 had".[30] 😢
Oh no, wait a minute, I overlooked the next sentence last time 😀 :
However, ext4 has continued to gain new features such as file encryption and metadata checksums.
- On the last system I put together I used xfs because I was thinking ext4 development was waning. TBH I can't really tell the difference in my regular usage.
  Word on the street is that xfs sometimes corrupts files, but I'm not sure if that's true anymore.
  Maybe on the next system I'll be back to ext4.
  
  Btrfs is newer and has more features
For those who still use it.
Ok I'm just giving it a hard time as I still use it for VMs
- I still use it (Ext4) exclusively and its great. How can you have a hard time with Ext4? It's the most proven and most polished FS. Its not like slowing down your system or being buggy or like that.
  
  Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn't obsolete.
  
  Btrfs snapshots made me stop using ext4 all together.
  
  It is slower than btrfs and lacks protection against corruption
- Well that's the default for debian based systems. So a lot of us use it.
ext4 is better than btrfs in terms of speed right?
- Yes, because it doesn't do as much to protect you from data corruption.
  If you have a use case where a barely-measurable increase in speed is essential, but not so essential that you wouldn't just pay for more RAM to keep it in cache, and also it doesn't matter if you get the wrong answer because you've not noticed the disk is failing, and you can afford to lose everything in the case of a power cut, then sure, use a legacy filesystem. Otherwise, use a modern one.
  
  Ext4 is not legacy, just because something newer is out there. Ext4 is proven and rock solid, not without reason the standard for most Linux systems. It doesn't randomly corrupt your files. If someone would read your reply, one would think that Ext4 is abandoned since decades and a risk to use.
  If one has to ask and don't understand Btrfs, should just use Ext4 by default; a safe and good option without risking anything. There are no downsides to this. Use Btrfs only, if you know what you are doing, if you understand it and actually need the extra functionality.
  
  and you can afford to lose everything in the case of a power cut
  But ext4 is a journaling filesystem, so a power cut shouldn't harm it.
I notice that this is from Huawei. If it was commercial software, this could not be used by anybody using US federal funding. Because this is Open Source, it will probably be put into use by the NSA, CIA, FBI, and NASA. Fascinating.
- There is a lot of development from China in the linux kernel. Also, to my knowledge there is a lot of chinese work in qemu and libvirt as well.

57 comments