exFAT File-System Enjoys Better Performance On Linux 7.2 With IOmap Conversion

In addition to open-source developer Namjae Jeon serving as maintainer for the new NTFS Linux driver, he also continues serving as maintainer to the exFAT file-system for that other Microsoft file-system popular with removable storage media.

The exFAT file-system work for Linux 7.2 is quite exciting in wrapping up an IOmap conversion port. The exFAT file-system driver on Linux is now adapted to use the IOmap infrastructure for buffered I/O, direct I/O, and LLSEEK SEEK_HOLE/SEEK_DATA support. IOmap is the lInux framework for mapping logical file offsets to physical storage blocks to replace the prior buffer head mechanism in the kernel. IOmap also serves for handling other common file operations across file-systems.

With the patches converting exFAT to use IOmap for these common operations, there are some very nice performance gains:

The exFAT pull request, which is already merged for Linux 7.2, there is also a number of fixes and other code improvements too. The performance enhancements alone from this IOmap conversion for exFAT make this a worthwhile update for exFAT Linux users.