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

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().”

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Wow my favorite FS is still being developed. Nice

thingsiplay OP ,

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.

entropicdrift ,
@entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

NVME SSDs vs HDDs, perhaps?

thingsiplay OP ,

Might be. It’s just guess work. My guess was maybe NVME SSD vs SATA SSD. Or maybe they refer to the CPU+RAM too.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Fedora people would say that BTRFS is better because it allows maintenance that EXT4 doesnt even have :)

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

I dislike Fedora anyways.

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Then I guess I dislike YOUR MUM

(continuing on useless comments)

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Reported

boredsquirrel ,
@boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net avatar

Haha okay fine if you want to XD I just made aware that such a comment is totally useless.

GolfNovemberUniform ,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

And it is totally useless indeed but tbh I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to make useless comments if it’s not a user asking for help.

thingsiplay OP ,

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.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

If you’re interested I have a fairly thorough “I use this” post on my website (last time I updated it was in early 2023) about btrfs.

thingsiplay OP ,

Sure! I’m interested into the “current” state or real world experience of it. Wouldn’t mind if you post it here. Although I am not sure how relevant it is 1 year later, because the filesystem is quite under development.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

Here you go: …virtadpt.net/…/experimenting-with-btrfs-in-produ…

That its under development means that it’s being maintained. EXT4 is still being developed, so is xfs. And the other ones that are fairly popular, for that matter.

thingsiplay OP , (edited )

Thanks. But it’s important to note your experience report is based on the experience of 2019 and the slight edits aren’t changing that. That its being developed is not the same as under maintenance. EXT4 is fully developed and there are only optimizations in performance expected, if anything, while BTRFS still needs active development to improve compatibility and some other features.

I’m still curious to how to work with it and such a report is still welcome. I’ll give it a read. Edit: Hopefully my reply didn’t sound too negative. I’m interested in the process of going all of this, so the article is useful in a practical sense.

soundconjurer ,
@soundconjurer@mstdn.social avatar

@thingsiplay @drwho , as soon as RAID5/6 is fully ready (and I am aware it looks like it'll never be), I'll be switching over to it.

narc0tic_bird ,

I’m not quite sure why people are still worried about the stability of btrfs when it has been rock solid for years. Synology has been using it for quite a while now in their NAS systems, they surely wouldn’t if it’d mean a lot of customers were at risk of losing their data.

There are valid reasons not to be using btrfs (although I’d argue most ordinary use cases don’t have a valid reason), but stability certainly isn’t one of them, independent of the distribution used (unless it’s ancient).

ArchAengelus ,

Wait til your table with all the checksums gets messed up on an “older” btrfs install. Happened to me on a VM because I didn’t know copy-on-write should be disabled for large frequently partially updated files. It also slowed that VMs IO down a lot.

Like most file systems, BTRFS is great if you know the edge cases. I recently moved to ZFS on my new work system, which has been a great change in terms of in-line snapshots and the like.

If EXT4 meets your needs, that’s awesome. If you understand how to use a different FS well or are willing to learn (and risk), I would also encourage other options as well.

thingsiplay OP ,

Note my research of BTRFS is almost a year old now. And there was still a few headlines making round of problems with BTRFS in some cases. A controlled NAS system is not the same as random user configuration of a random desktop user. And as said in my comment, I was not sure if it would be stable for my installation (when I did my research) and did not claim it to be unstable. On the other side, I know for a fact that EXT4 is stable and I did not research more or experiment to find out which one is better for me.

Current state of BTRFS: btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html (note when I did my research, Linux was at Kernel v6.4, therefore BTRFS was in a worse situation than today)

narc0tic_bird ,

Tumbleweed people like me would say it’s a great filesystem because it enables snapper to work effortlessly.

autotldr Bot ,

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!

lemmyreader ,

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.

beejjorgensen ,
@beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

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