2.6.36 offers VFS optimisations, has returned to integrating Ext3 file systems with "data=ordered" by default and can store data from shared Windows or Samba disks in local cache to improve performance. Numerous new and improved drivers enhance the kernel's storage and network hardware support

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time.

The kernel development team have enhanced various aspects of Btrfs, one effect of which is to significantly improve the experimental file system's write performance. A number of changes to the block layer promise better data throughputs and reactivity. There are also several new drivers for storage hardware.

The past few Linux kernel releases have brought a number of new file-systems to the Linux world. Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

The Kernel Log is taking the opportunity to continue its series of reports on the major changes in Linux 2.6.31 compared to the current 2.6.30 kernel with an overview of storage and file systems.

Linux Mint 10 is the first version of Linux Mint with built-in support for the B-tree File System (btrfs). Btrfs is one of the newest file systems in the Linux kernel.

File-system benchmarks have become quite common to Phoronix in the age of EXT4 and Btrfs with these new file-systems driving much of the interest and as we have also been finding the Linux file-system performance to change between kernel releases. This time around we are using a Git snapshot of the Linux 2.6.34 kernel.

This morning we published benchmarks of ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs when running these three popular file-systems off a high-performance OCZ Vertex 2 solid-state drive. To a fair amount of surprise, the EXT4 file-system ended up beating out Btrfs on the SSD in a number of tests.