Linux 3.12 Kernel To Bring Faster File-Systems

With the Linux 3.12 kernel due for release in several weeks time but all major changes behind us now, here are some file-system tests from this forthcoming kernel update. Tested Linux file-systems for this Phoronix article include EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS. From these results, there are multiple instances of these file-systems running measurably faster than Linux 3.11.

EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems were tested as they're the mainline file-systems with the most promise and usage now for single-disk systems. Benchmarks of other out-of-tree file-systems like ZFS will come at a later time, but for now you can always see our latest ZFS vs. EXT4 vs. Btrfs benchmarks or the 10-way Linux file-system comparison on Linux 3.10.

For the single-disk testing in this article, all four file-systems were tested with their default mount options from the mainline Linux kernel. These mount options are reflected in the auto-generated Phoronix Test Suite (https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/) system table shown on this page. In adding some context to these Linux 3.12 file-system results from the Git kernel, the same file-system tests on the same system were also done using the stable Linux 3.11 kernel. The same hardware was throughout all of the testing. (On the system table, the CPU frequencies are reported differently between the 3.11 and 3.12 kernels, but they were running at the same speed; the CPU freq driver on Linux 3.12 is now reporting the turbo frequency rather than the base clock frequency.)

The system used for this file-system performance testing was the System76 Galago UltraPro ultrabook with Intel Core i7 4750HQ "Haswell" processor and Intel 120GB SSDMCEAC12. All of these Linux file-system benchmarks were carried out in a fully automated and reproducible manner using the industry-leading open-source Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org software.