[PATCH v2 3/3] fat: allocate multiple clusters in fallocate
From: Matheus Alves de Almeida
Date: Mon Oct 12 2026 - 13:17:36 EST
The fat_fallocate() code currently does many 1-cluster allocations when
growing a file in the FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE path. Make it allocate
everything with one call instead.
Benchmarking was done under QEMU/KVM with a virtio-blk device using
cache=none. Each result is the arithmetic mean of the listed samples.
start = now_ns();
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < count; i++)
fallocate(fds[i], FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE, 0, bytes);
elapsed = now_ns() - start;
FAT32 with 512-byte clusters using count=16 files:
length mounted sync? before after improvement samples
256MiB no 2.328s 0.175s 13.2x 10
16MiB no 149.659ms 14.036ms 10.7x 10
16MiB yes 747.993s 3.445s 217.1x 3
1MiB yes 46.63s 0.333s 140.1x 10
FAT32 with 512-byte clusters using count=128 files:
length mounted sync? before after improvement samples
1MiB no 90.873ms 4.686ms 19.4x 10
16KiB no 1.287ms 0.241ms 5.3x 10
128KiB yes 47.284s 0.350s 135x 10
4KiB yes 1.98s 0.144s 13.7x 10
FAT32 with 4096-byte clusters using count=16 files:
length mounted sync? before after improvement samples
256MiB no 295.392ms 24.733ms 11.9x 10
16MiB no 20.509ms 1.404ms 14.6x 10
16MiB yes 92.489s 0.348s 265.4x 10
1MiB yes 5.837s 0.048s 121.3x 10
The improvement is especially large on synchronous mounts, where the
new code can batch FAT updates instead of synchronously handling each
cluster allocation separately.
Signed-off-by: Matheus Alves de Almeida <matheus.aalmeida@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
fs/fat/file.c | 10 ++++------
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
diff --git a/fs/fat/file.c b/fs/fat/file.c
index 41d49e9de..3aa541c6b 100644
--- a/fs/fat/file.c
+++ b/fs/fat/file.c
@@ -290,12 +290,10 @@ static long fat_fallocate(struct file *file, int mode,
nr_cluster = (mm_bytes + (sbi->cluster_size - 1)) >>
sbi->cluster_bits;
- /* Start the allocation.We are not zeroing out the clusters */
- while (nr_cluster-- > 0) {
- err = fat_add_clusters(inode, 1);
- if (err)
- goto error;
- }
+ /* Allocate the clusters. We are not zeroing them out */
+ err = fat_add_clusters(inode, nr_cluster);
+ if (err)
+ goto error;
} else {
if ((offset + len) <= i_size_read(inode))
goto error;
--
2.43.0