Linux Kernel Daily: VFS Infrastructure Overhaul and Performance Improvements
The Linux kernel received a comprehensive VFS subsystem update focused on modernizing filesystem infrastructure and improving performance, with major changes to buffer handling, writeback mechanisms, and filesystem APIs across multiple merge commits from Linus Torvalds.
Duration: PT2M14S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Linux Kernel Daily.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Linux Kernel Daily
- Published: 2026-06-15T06:00:57Z
- Audio duration: PT2M14S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Good morning, I'm your host with the Linux Kernel Daily for June 15th, 2026.
Today's activity centers on a significant VFS infrastructure modernization effort, with Linus Torvalds merging multiple comprehensive updates that touch core filesystem operations and performance bottlenecks.
The most impactful change is a complete rework of buffer head handling. The kernel removed the b_end_io function pointer from struct buffer_head, replacing it with new bh_submit interfaces that set bio completion handlers directly. This eliminates two indirect function calls in the completion path, shrinks buffer…
Performance improvements extend to writeback and pipe operations. The writeback system now uses per-superblock counters for inode writeback switches instead of global synchronization, reducing umount latency from 92-138 milliseconds down to 5-8 milliseconds under cgroup writeback churn. For pipes, page allocation…
The VFS layer also received API modernization through extended attribute handling. The simple xattr system moved from per-inode hash tables to per-superblock caching, reducing overhead for the common case of few or no extended attributes. Additionally, iomap gained fs-verity support…
T…
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