exFAT Gets Massive 16x Speed Boost in New Linux 6.18 Kernel Release
Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 6.18. The update brings a massive performance boost for exFAT and deletes another file system. There is also important support for Apple Silicon M2 and changes to Nvidia drivers.
File system changes
The starting signal has been given for the Linux Kernel 6.18. Linus Torvalds has released the new version, which will be released in time for the end of 2025 and brings extensive optimizations and innovations. One of them is particularly likely to make users of external storage media and cameras sit up and take notice. Because the exFAT file system developed by Microsoft is receiving a massive speed boost. In practice, this means that mount or directory search operations that previously took over 40 seconds with unfavorable cluster sizes are now completed in around 2.5 seconds. This corresponds to an acceleration by a factor of 16. This boost solves a long-standing bottleneck in managing large amounts of files on SD cards and USB sticks.
While exFAT is gaining momentum, another modern file system has to give way. Bcachefs was removed from the mainline kernel due to ongoing and sometimes personal conflicts over code quality and practices between Linus Torvalds and lead developer Kent Overstreet. In the future, it will only be maintained as an external DKMS module, which makes the kernel computationally easier by over 117,000 lines of code. Things look more positive with the established alternatives. Btrfs now processes read-intensive workloads more efficiently and benefits from new locking mechanisms. XFS, which is particularly popular with servers, performs online file system checks by default to ensure integrity during operation without having to unmount disks. How Phoronix reports, Linux 6.18 is already considered a hot candidate for the next long-term support kernel due to its scope and release period, which will be provided with security updates over several years.
Apple Silicon and Nvidia optimization
In the hardware area, the expanded support for Apple Silicon stands out. Thanks to the ongoing work of the Asahi Linux team, device trees for the M2 series (Pro, Max and Ultra) can now be found directly in the kernel. Although this enables booting, full use of all hardware features including full PCIe support is still missing for the Mac Pro devices. Nvidia users now benefit from the GSP firmware (GPU System Processor) as standard with the free Nouveau driver from the Turing generation (RTX 2000 series). This shifts initialization tasks directly to the chip and promises better performance and more stable energy management. There are also security adjustments that have a direct impact on system performance. TPM bus encryption, originally implemented to protect against sniffing attacks on the data bus, is disabled by default in version 6.18. In the past, this feature resulted in noticeable performance degradation during system boot and cryptographic operations on some systems. However, security-conscious users who fear physical attacks on their hardware can manually reactivate the feature at any time using the “TCG-TPM2_HMAC” parameter.
Caring for old AMD hardware
Aside from the big headlines, the community also continues to maintain older hardware, albeit with restrictions. Various cleanups have been carried out in the Radeon driver for very old AMD graphics cards with the TeraScale architecture. This is pure maintenance without adding any new functions. At the same time, optimizations for TCP were made in the network stack, which should slightly increase data throughput in high-speed networks. Kernel 6.18 is available now ready for download and is expected in rolling release distributions such as Arch Linux in the coming weeks.
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