F2FS File-System Shows Regressions On Linux 3.10

With the merge window on the feature-rich Linux 3.10 kernel having been closed, the usual roundabout of Phoronix benchmarking of the Linux kernel has commenced. In our initial testing of the F2FS file-system on Linux 3.10, however, yields negative performance changes.

The first F2FS benchmarks showed much hope for the Samsung-developed "Flash Friendly File-System" when compared to EXT4, Btrfs, and other competitors. It's worked very well for not only SSDs but also SDHC storage, USB flash drives, and against the cruddy Microsoft exFAT Linux support.

With F2FS for the Linux 3.10 kernel there were major changes as noted in the earlier article. There's now a global lock scheme, new trace points, improvements to the cleaning process, enhanced management, new critical deadlock conditions, and numerous other low-level changes to the file-system that was introduced in the Linux 3.8 kernel.

For this early benchmarking of the Linux 3.10-rc1 kernel, the F2FS performance was compared from a 160GB Intel SSD when using the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels and the Flash Friendly File-System was cleanly formatted each time. Benchmarking was done on a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 laptop with an Intel Core i7 720QM CPU and was running Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64.