Linux 3.14 File-System HDD Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 20 February 2014 at 12:32 AM EST. Page 1 of 4. 26 Comments.

Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we're now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.

For this first round of HDD testing from the Linux 3.14 kernel, the Intel Core i7 4960X Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition system was used and its storage was backed by a Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive. The file-systems tested were EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS. All three file-systems were tested on the Linux 3.12 and 3.13 stable kernels and then a Linux 3.14 Git snapshot. For independent reproducibility of the results, these vanilla kernels were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

Between each kernel/file-system, the tested partition was freshly formatted. Each file-system on each kernel was tested with its default mount options. No other configuration changes were made between each file-system / kernel tests. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite. With all of that said, on the following pages are the results from this initial file-system HDD-based benchmarking of Linux 3.14.


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