6 minutes 50 seconds: a change in the Linux kernel greatly improves the speed of file transfer to FAT

If you are one of those that uses Linux for any reason and still you manage devices with file systems FAT16 or FAT32there’s good news for you: the speed of data transfer just to receive a huge push thanks to new code that will be included in the Linux kernel.

This is a patch sent by OGAWA Hirofumi, known for his work in the special file system for Linux, Tux3. This new code improves the system call of the Linux kernel, which loads the contents of a file in the cache of the page, that is to say, the “readahead”.

Copy photos from USB sticks, SD cards and digital cameras will be faster

While in Linux there is excellent support for exFAT, a file system more modern and with better transfer rates, there are many reasons why you could use FAT, such as for example in pendrives old, or SD cards of digital cameras, EFI partitions, etc.

Thanks to the new code, the performance of the readahead in FAT improves substantially, and in fact, in the tests made by the developer with a USB hard drive slow of 2 TB, found that file transfers than before you took 383.18 seconds (over 6 minutes) is now completed in only 51.03 seconds.

The next version of the Linux kernel will be the 5.7, whose version rc1 was announced by Linus Torvalds on the 12th of April. However, the changes made by OGAWA would not enter until the window of the kernel 5.8.

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The news

it was originally published in

Engadget

by
Gabriela Gonzalez

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