Linux 7.4 will bring another round of performance optimizations to the Btrfs file system, building on the larger gains that landed in Linux 7.3, which Linus Torvalds released on October 18, 2026. Btrfs maintainer David Sterba of SUSE sent the Btrfs pull request for 7.4 on October 15, and Phoronix summarized the speed-ups on October 19.

Sterba described the performance work as minor. For users who compress their file systems with Btrfs' transparent Zstd support, the pull request lists a "minor speedup in zstd decompression (+8MB/s)."

A second change reduces contention on the inode extent map lock. According to the pull request, that helps cases such as the shrinker processing inodes that have no extent maps, with a "measured time reduction 10-20%."

Reflinks also get faster.…