Benchmarking Linux 3.16 File-Systems On An SSD

With the Linux 3.16 kernel coming along nicely, here's our first tests of this forthcoming major kernel upgrade when it comes to the mainline file-systems and their performance from a solid-state drive.

For this initial disk/file-system testing on Linux 3.16, an ASUS Zenbook Prime Intel Core i7 ultrabook with dual 128GB SanDisk SSDs were used with the secondary SSD being devoted for the benchmarking of the different file-systems. Benchmarks of Linux 3.16 using a hard drive will come in a later Phoronix article.

For today's testing, the XFS, F2FS, and EXT4 file-systems were benchmarked. Btrfs sadly had to be left out since it was oddly unstable with the Linux 3.16 kernel snapshot that was tested. The system was hanging and experiencing other odd issues with Linux 3.16; up to now I hadn't encountered any major Btrfs issues like this in years. Btrfs will be re-tested later in the Linux 3.16 cycle when the issue is hopefully resolved.

With the Linux 3.16 kernel there aren't any major changes to EXT4, but for F2FS there's a number of changes along with continued work on improving XFS.

In this EXT4, XFS, and F2FS file-system testing the Linux 3.16 kernel Git snapshot was compared to the Linux 3.15 stable kernel. The stock mount options were used for each file-system throughout testing. All Linux disk testing was handled by the Phoronix Test Suite.