Btrfs Ready With More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.3: Some ~3x To ~5x Wins - Phoronix
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium Ad-Free<br>Contact
Popular Categories
Close
Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium
Contact
Categories
Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals
Btrfs Ready With More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.3: Some ~3x To ~5x Wins
Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 19 August 2026 at 01:50 PM EDT. 3 Comments
David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system feature updates today that target the Linux 7.3 merge window. Among other changes are more performance improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.
Btrfs with Linux 7.3 is now using the IOmap bounce buffer for direct I/O rather than falling back to buffered I/O. The merge request notes that past correctness vs. speed trade-offs dropped performance to around 50% of the theoretical maximum while now it's up to around 95% that theoretical max. In other words, effectively doubled.
Btrfs also now replaced XArray with a local LRU list for tracking inhibited extent buffers, which can yield around 3x better performance. By removing an unnecessary one jiffy delay in the non-SSD mode with multiple logging tasks, latency has dropped while throughput increased by around 5x on a sample workload. Another 5x win is with the skip hope detection logic during full fsync for files without holes but lots of extents. Btrfs also has other performance improvements around locking and more.
Btrfs also now disables its free-space v1 code by default in favor of free-space v2 that has been the default for years. Plus there are a number of bug fixes and other code improvements.
More details on these many Btrfs file-system improvements to find with Linux 7.3 can be found via this pull request.
3 Comments
Tweet
IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further<br>Linux 7.3 Corrects Faulty Behavior Of FAT File-System Driver For Filenames Too Fat<br>XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3<br>EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3<br>AVX-512 xor_gen Continues To Look Exciting For Helping Linux RAID With Modern CPUs<br>Open-Source exFAT Programs 1.4.3 Improves Fsck & Mkfs
Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.
GNOME Designers Lay Out Some Of Their GNOME Shell Dreams<br>QEMU 11.1 Released With Numerous Improvements<br>OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux<br>Rsync 3.5 Released As "Extraordinary" Update To Fix 33 Security Issues<br>Comma.ai Launches A PCIe Gen4 x4 To USB4 Dock With Open-Source Firmware<br>Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements<br>Omarchy 4.0 Linux Distro Released With Desktop Shell Now Implemented Via Quickshell<br>GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements
Btrfs Ready With More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.3: Some ~3x To ~5x Wins
XWayland 26.1 RC1 Released With Many New Features
Linux 7.3 Deprecates Many Older 32-bit ARM Platforms, Orphans Hundreds Of Drivers
PHP 7.4 To PHP 8.6 Benchmarks, PHP 8.6 JIT Performance
Linux 7.3 Scheduler Improvements: Help For Gaming, Hybrid CPUs, Lower Scheduler Latency
New AMD Low-Power Core & Unified Intel/AMD CPU Core Type Handling In Linux 7.3
Modular's Mojo Language Now Open-Source Following Qualcomm Acquisition
COSMIC Epoch 1.6 Released With Per-App Volume Control, Remote Desktop Preparations
IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further
Framework Laptop 12 Updated For Intel Wildcat Lake, Shipping Starts In October
Rust For Linux 7.3 Begins Seeing Fixes To Prepare For Rust's GCC Backend
Phoronix Premium allows ad-free access to the site, multi-page articles on a single page, and other features while supporting this site's continued operations.
AMD EPYC 9005 Series Memory Scaling Performance From 4 To 24 DDR5 RDIMMs
The CachyOS Performance vs. Other Linux Operating Systems On A $46k USD Workstation
ARCTIC Fan Controller: The Best Fan Controller For Linux Desktops, Less Than $10 USD
Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series
The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+
The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also...