exfatprogs 1.4.4 Brings Speed-Up For Making New exFAT Filesystems

The exfatprogs 1.4.4 release was issued today for these user-space open-source programs for managing exFAT file-systems on Linux. With exfatprogs 1.4.4 the mkfs.exfat command can now be faster for full formats by making use of the BLKZEROOUT command for filling a specified range of a block device with zeroes. For setups where BLKZEROOUT is supported with the underlying storage device supporting SCSI WRITE_SAME or NVME Write Zeroes, the full format speed should be better. The mkfs.exfat also now opts for selecting larger zeroing batches and improving the quiet and trace progress output. The exfatprogs update for mkfs.exfat also now reduces page cache pollution during he full formatting on systems with support for POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE. Another change with exfatprogs is adding optional I/O statistics for profiling read / write / discard / zero-out / sync operations. Plus there are a variety of bug fixes for the exFAT programs as outlined in the release announcement on GitHub.