A Linux developer offers all Linux users a six percent performance increase by releasing an update that only takes five minutes.

Jens Axboe of Linux, developer of IO_uring, says he has been thinking about implementing an update for Linux for years. After finally putting aside his hesitation, the update took just five minutes and delivered a six percent performance increase in I/O operations. According to Axboe, Linux users could experience many benefits in the future. The improvement could be released to the general public this year with Linux 6.9.

Five minutes of work

It took Jens Axboe five minutes to implement the code changes, resulting in a six percent performance improvement in I/O operations. The patches appear to provide improvements by reducing the number of queries to the I/O system.

Axboe writes in his RFC patch notes that “a lot of code is very careful about requesting polling time.” There is already code to mitigate this, but the new patch set simply caches the current time in struct blk_plug, with the assumption “This can lead to problems querying with sufficient granularity.”

Increased performance by six percent

In Axboe’s test, there was an improvement in IOPS values ​​of six percent compared to pre- and post-patching. Additionally, Axboe believes that real-world Linux users will still see major benefits. The more kernels used by Linux vendors, the more you can get out of Axboe’s new patches. Phoronix believes there is a good chance the RFC patches will be ready by the end of this year Upstreaming with Linux 6.9.