Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of “non-MM” patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18.
If browsing through the non-MM pull request sent out for Linux 6.18 there are some interesting items like adding keyboard interaction support to the delaytop monitoring tool and fixing EFI boot with Kexec Handover (KHO) support but standing out at the end is:
“The 2 patch series “Squashfs: performance improvement and a sanity check” from Phillip Lougher teaches squashfs’s lseek() about SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE. A mere 150x speedup was measured for a well-chosen microbenchmark.”
Yes, a big freaking win for SquashFS albeit in cases of sparse copying.
This optimization work was previously covered on Phoronix and the 150x metric actually revised down from prior estimates but nevertheless a significant improvement for those dealing with SquashFS and sparse files.
Plus many other changes round out a rather hearty non-MM pull for Linux 6.18. The code was merged a short while ago and thus no objections from Linus Torvalds.
