With the Linux 6.17 kernel there are some block allocation scalability improvements for EXT4 on top of other file-system enhancements with this new kernel and other new features. Linux 6.17 performance has been looking good and when drilling down to the EXT4 file-system performance, it’s looking extremely good. Here are some benchmarks of EXT4 on Linux 6.17 compared to the 6.15 and 6.16 stable kernels.
Given the EXT4 improvements and other kernel enhancements that were merged a few weeks back for Linux 6.17, I’ve been eager to test out the new kernel. For this round of testing I was using an AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX workstation with a Western Digital WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB NVMe SSD.
Using an EXT4 file-system I compared the performance across the Linux 6.15 stable, Linux 6.16 stable, and Linux 6.17 Git kernels from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. The system was running an otherwise standard Ubuntu 25.04 installation. From there a variety of I/O benchmarks were run for a promising first round of EXT4 benchmarking on Linux 6.17. Further EXT4 tests and Linux 6.17 benchmarks at large remain ongoing at Phoronix.
