Linux 5.10 FUSE To Allow Faster Performance With VirtIO-FS
The most prominent change with FUSE in Linux 5.10 is a "DAX" mode for allowing direct access to the host page cache. Making use of this direct access support for the host page cache is the VirtIO-FS file-system for sharing files/folders with virtualized guests.
By allowing direct access to the host page cache, there is no longer any double caching and most I/O operations should be significantly faster.
This big speed-up for VirtIO-FS was previously outlined on Phoronix back in August. Now for Linux 5.10 the VirtIO-FS DAX support is ready to go. But making use of this direct access to the host page cache does require using VirtIO-FS with the "dax" mount option and the FUSE_DAX Kconfig build option.
The FUSE changes for Linux 5.10 also allow now automatic sub-mounting support within VirtIO-FS too. Aside from those VirtIO-FS activities, not much else is going on for FUSE itself with Linux 5.10 given that all the interesting developments largely happen in user-space with the file-systems leveraging it.
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