A tiny patch with a huge result just landed in Linux 7.4.
What changed
Matheus Alves de Almeida changed the FAT driver’s allocation path. When a file grew with FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE (pre-allocating space without changing the reported size), the driver did lots of one-cluster allocations. Now it grabs many clusters in one call. His benchmarks show up to a 265x speed-up. It was merged this week in Andrew Morton’s non-MM pull.
My take
FAT32 isn’t glamorous, but it’s on every SD card, USB stick and EFI partition. A few lines of code for that kind of win is great. It’s a good reminder that old code paths still have easy gains hiding in them.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
