EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts'o noted that the file-system is improving performance by allowing parallel direct I/O writes where previously were being too conservative when checking if it was safe to avoid requiring an exclusive lock.
There is also better performance of ext4_mb_prefetch() within the multi-block allocator by using fallocate() to avoid work when it's not needed. In addition, improved performance when carrying out an overwrite to an already up-to-date folio.
EXT4 with Linux 7.3 is also bringing some code clean-ups, avoiding possible soft lockups or RCU stall conditions, and a variety of bug fixes.
The full list of these EXT4 feature changes for Linux 7.3 can be found via this pull request .
With all these EXT4 performance improvements plus work on other file-systems like heavy Btrfs improvements will make for some interesting Linux 7.3 file-system benchmarks as the cycle settles down.