BSD/Linux Kernel: Extending ZFS Performance Without Hardware Upgrades, Slop Flooding Bug Tracking in Linux With Sabotaging Noise, Development Statistics for the Slop-Filled Linux 7.0

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 23, 2026

• Klara ☛ Extending ZFS Performance Without Hardware Upgrades

  ZFS performance doesn’t always require new hardware—just smarter tuning. Through effective ZFS performance tuning, including optimizing recordsize, compression, pool topology, and prefetch behavior, you can significantly improve throughput, reduce latency, and get more out of your existing OpenZFS deployment.

• LWN ☛ Kernel code removals driven by LLM-created security reports

  There are a number of ongoing efforts to remove kernel code, mostly from

  the networking subsystem, as an alternative to dealing with the increase in

  security-bug reports from large language models. The proposed removals

  include ISA

  and PCMCIA Ethernet drivers, a pair

  of PCI drivers, the ax25 and amateur

  radio subsystem, the ATM protocols and drivers,

  and the ISDN

  subsystem.

• LWN ☛ Removing read-only transparent huge pages for the page cache [LWN.net]

  Things do not always go the way kernel developers think they will. When the kernel gained support for the creation of read-only transparent huge pages for the page cache in 2019, the developer of that feature, Song Liu, added a Kconfig file entry promising that support for writable huge pages would arrive ""in the next few release cycles"". Over six years later, that promise is still present, but it will never be fulfilled. Instead, the read-only option will soon be removed, reflecting how the core of the memory-subsystem has changed underneath this particular feature.

  The transparent huge pages (THP) feature automatically collects base pages into 2MB (on Intel processors) huge pages. Use of huge pages can be beneficial as a way of reducing memory-management overhead and (especially) the load on the CPU's translation lookaside buffer (TLB), but only if most of the memory contained within the huge pages is actually used. Initially, the THP feature only worked with anonymous memory (program data and such), leaving file-backed memory untouched.

  There are advantages to using huge pages for file-backed memory as well, though, for all of the same reasons, but implementing that support was a harder task. The page cache at that time was true to its name, in that it was focused on the caching of individual base pages; there was no huge-page awareness at that level. So, for many years, THP was limited to anonymous memory.

• LWN ☛ Development statistics for the 7.0 kernel [LWN.net]

  Linus Torvalds released the 7.0 kernel as expected on April 12, ending a relatively busy development cycle. The 7.0 release brings a large number of interesting changes; see the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for all the details. Here, instead, comes our traditional look at where those changes came from and who supported that work.

  As a reminder: LWN subscribers can find much of the information below — and more — at any time in the LWN kernel source database.

  The 7.0 development cycle saw the addition of 14,251 non-merge commits, a fairly typical number. A bit less typical is that those contributions came from 2,362 developers, greatly exceeding the previous record (2,134) set with 6.19. A surprising 489 of those developers made their first contribution to the kernel in this cycle.