Large Folios Able To Deliver Big Performance Gains For FUSE With Linux 7.4

Following the FUSE improvements in Linux 7.3 for file-systems in user-space, it looks like the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be ready to enable the large folios feature. Large folios are multiple contiguous physical pages grouped into a single folio for lower overhead and better performance. FUSE is preparing to enable large folios when not under memory pressure. This patch enabling large folios made it into FUSE's for-next Git branch and thus expected to be merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Benchmarks on that patch of using libfuse passthrough_hp with buffered FIO show some very nice gains with a TMPFS backing as well as with XFS on NVMe backing for cold I/O: Very nice and that's in addition to all of the other FUSE optimizations we have seen in recent months. Linux 7.4 continues to look quite exciting and potentially this year's LTS kernel version if Linux 7.3 doesn't get called, depending upon the alignment of the kernel release cycles for the remainder of 2026.