Large Folios Able To Deliver Big Performance Gains For FUSE With Linux 7.4

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 29 September 2026 at 06:30 AM EDT. Add A Comment
LINUX STORAGE
Following the FUSE improvements in Linux 7.3 for file-systems in user-space, it looks like the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be ready to enable the large folios feature.

Large folios are multiple contiguous physical pages grouped into a single folio for lower overhead and better performance. FUSE is preparing to enable large folios when not under memory pressure.

This patch enabling large folios made it into FUSE's for-next Git branch and thus expected to be merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel.

Benchmarks on that patch of using libfuse passthrough_hp with buffered FIO show some very nice gains with a TMPFS backing as well as with XFS on NVMe backing for cold I/O:

FUSE large folio benchmarks


Very nice and that's in addition to all of the other FUSE optimizations we have seen in recent months. Linux 7.4 continues to look quite exciting and potentially this year's LTS kernel version if Linux 7.3 doesn't get called, depending upon the alignment of the kernel release cycles for the remainder of 2026.
Related News
About The Author

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week