Microsoft exFAT To Receive Huge Performance Boost on Linux Sony’s Take Is Here

Three years after the start of support for exFAT for Linux, there is now good news regarding a performance update: The developer Yuezhang Mo, who works for Sony, has “tickled out” a performance boost with a new patch.

This is reported by the magazine Neowin and summarizes the results of Yuezhang Mo’s update. exFAT will get a big performance boost with Linux 6.2, thanks to Sony’s recent efforts.

Yuezhang Mo, an engineer at the Japanese tech giant, found that reducing the repeated traversal of directory entries significantly boosted exFAT’s performance. And this is particularly noticeable with less powerful CPUs.

With Simple trick

Mo discovered that after all directory entries have been traversed, the empty directory entry is displayed regardless of whether there are enough empty directory entries or not.

Avoiding repeated iterations of directory entries reduces CPU usage and improves performance when creating files and directories (especially on low-end CPUs). Tests were performed on 5,000 files to arrive at this conclusion. What was interesting was that the improvement scaled with the number of files. The largest increase in the test was almost 58 percent. The test was performed on a SABER i.MX6 Lite development board with a class 4 SD card. The results should now lead to a massive increase in performance in the upcoming Linux 6.2.

Microsoft launched the 64-bit exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) file system as a successor to the 32-bit FAT32 file system in 2012. As of 2019, support for the exFAT format in Linux was being worked on. However, since its launch, Microsoft has released a few changes.

Sony, on the other hand, has turned to exFAT with more passion. As early as April this year, Yuezhang Mo found that with activated DirSync, an improvement of up to 85.4 percent was achieved in certain cases. Now he is working on further performance improvements.