Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size . Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes.

Huawei engineer Baokun Li sent out the patch series on Saturday for wrapping up work on enabling block sizes larger than page size for EXT4. With EXT4 already supporting large folios, various small changes throughout the EXT4 codebase are needed to make proper assumptions around the larger block size.

The benchmark results are looking good for this "Large Block Size" (LBS) support with EXT4. Large Block Size is improving the BIO write performance by about 50% on average compared to bigalloc:

These patches for those interested can be found on the Linux kernel mailing list .