EROFS Lands Support For Tapping Intel QAT Accelerators

There is a lot of exciting file-system changes landing for the Linux 6.16 kernel... EXT4 brings a "really stupendous performance" change, Btrfs also brings some performance improvements, XFS landed atomic writes, and Bcachefs continues stabilizing. For the EROFS read-only file-system its changes have been merged and includes support for Intel QAT acceleration.

The headline EROFS change for Linux 6.16 is adding support for leveraging Intel QuickAssist (QAT) accelerators for improving DEFLATE decompression performance of compressed read-only file-systems for servers and with EROFS finding use in recent years among containers. EROFS maintainer Gao Xiang explained of the Intel QAT support:

"In this cycle, Intel QAT hardware accelerators are supported to improve DEFLATE decompression performance. I've also tested it with the enwik9 dataset of 1 MiB pclusters on our Intel Sapphire Rapids bare-metal server and a PL0 ESSD, and the sequential read performance even surpasses LZ4 software decompression on this setup."

Intel QAT accelerators are built-in to Xeon Scalable processors since Sapphire Rapids.

The Intel QAT support for faster DEFLATE with EROFS was merged as part of this pull request for Linux 6.16.