FAT32 File-System Seeing As Much As 265x Improvement With Linux 7.4

A change merged for Linux 7.4 is showing some mighty big speed-ups for the FAT32 file-system. Open-source developer Matheus Alves de Almeida has worked through a patch affecting just a few lines of code that yield as much as a 265x improvement for FAT32. The change is adjusting the FAT driver's allocation code path with the status quo being to do many 1-cluster allocations when growing a file with FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE. The FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZEFALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE flag is used for pre-allocating disk space for a file but not changing the reported file-size. Rather than doing many one-cluster allocations, the few lines of code makes it allocate multiple clusters in one call. Benchmarks shared by Matheus Alves de Almeida show some mighty big improvements across the board: The patches were merged this week into Linux 7.4 as part of the non-MM pull request sent in by Andrew Morton.