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.

devs

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.