VOOZH about

URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/SquashFS-Faster-Sparse-Copy

⇱ SquashFS Optimization Achieves 15,277x Performance In Developer Benchmark - Phoronix


👁 Phoronix

SquashFS Optimization Achieves 15,277x Performance In Developer Benchmark

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 23 September 2025 at 08:23 PM EDT. 16 Comments
SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system.

The patch for SquashFS wires up SEEK_DATA and SEEK_HOLE support for much faster searchs for holes and data within sparse files. In cases of sparse copying of files with large holes, this can lead to very significant performance improvements for this file-system.

The benchmark shown by Lougher for a sparse copy of a big file with a massive hole yielded a wild improvement. Where the status quo took nearly 12 minutes, the 100+ lines of new code for SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE handling took just 0.047 seconds. Or 15,277 times faster.

👁 SquashFS massive performance gain


Quite a massive performance win for SquashFS when dealing with sparse files via this patch now under review on the Linux kernel mailing list.

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.