Linux is suddenly 6% faster in one respect after a developer spent 5 minutes tinkering with it

An enterprising Linux developer has managed to cook up some tweaks for Linux that give a 6% boost to file system performance.

As explained on X (formerly Twitter), Jens Axboe made just a couple of changes to a caching algorithm that led to a notable increase in speed for I/O operations.

Apparently Axboe had been meaning to make this code change for years, but only just got around to doing so.

The sum total of work is two patches and around five minutes of labor, which is pretty impressive, as Phoronix.com, which picked up on this tweet, reports.

Moreover, the gains could be bigger on a full-scale distro-style kernel config. Axboe points out: "Results in patch 2, but tldr is a more than 6% improvement (108M -> 115M IOPS) for my test case, which doesn't even enable most of the costly block layer items that you'd typically find in a distro and which would further increase the number of issue side time calls."

With any luck, this work will be incorporated into Linux v6.9 and users will get the benefit (that version is expected to arrive as stable in the summer, though we have v6.8 which is close to release before that).

In other recent Linux news, the operating system is going from strength to strength in terms of market share of late. It's now on 3.82% of desktop PCs out there according to Statcounter's latest figures for December 2023.

Around the middle of last year, Linux hit fresh heights of 3% market adoption for desktop operating systems, and that momentum has been sustained. Now, we're looking at the 4% mark, although of course, that's still a relatively modest total compared to Windows (73%) and macOS (16%).