Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today’s article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.
Due to each round of file-system benchmarks taking hours, Linux 6.12 LTS was the cut-off for this comparison since that already stretches to November 2024 and was that year’s Long Term Support kernel. Just EXT4 and XFS are being looked at today while a separate article is still being worked on for a similar comparison with the Btrfs file-system performance over succeeding kernels.
XFS and EXT4 were tested each time with its default mount options and using the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for all of the tested kernel builds for easy reproducibility.
A Solidigm D7-PS1010 PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD (SB5PH27X038T) was used for testing the file-systems on each of these Linux kernel versions. This Solidigm PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD was running on a server build with the AMD EPYC 9745 128-Core Zen 5 CPU, Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 motherboard, and 12 x 64GB DDR5 memory. An Ubuntu 26.04 development snapshot with all its latest packages were running on this AMD EPYC Turin server.
So let’s see how EXT4 and XFS upstream file-system performance has evolved roughly over the past year and a half of Linux kernel releases.
