Add zstd compression and decompression support to BtrFS. zstd at its
fastest level compresses almost as well as zlib, while offering much
faster compression and decompression, approaching lzo speeds.
I benchmarked btrfs with zstd compression against no compression, lzo
compression, and zlib compression. I benchmarked two scenarios. Copying
a set of files to btrfs, and then reading the files. Copying a tarball
to btrfs, extracting it to btrfs, and then reading the extracted files.
After every operation, I call `sync` and include the sync time.
Between every pair of operations I unmount and remount the filesystem
to avoid caching. The benchmark files can be found in the upstream
zstd source repository under
`contrib/linux-kernel/{btrfs-benchmark.sh,btrfs-extract-benchmark.sh}`
[1] [2].
I ran the benchmarks on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM with 2 cores and 4 GiB of RAM.
The VM is running on a MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz Intel Core i7 processor,
16 GB of RAM, and a SSD.
The first compression benchmark is copying 10 copies of the unzipped
Silesia corpus [3] into a BtrFS filesystem mounted with
`-o compress-force=Method`. The decompression benchmark times how long
it takes to `tar` all 10 copies into `/dev/null`. The compression ratio is
measured by comparing the output of `df` and `du`. See the benchmark file
[1] for details. I benchmarked multiple zstd compression levels, although
the patch uses zstd level 1.
The next benchmark first copies `linux-4.11.6.tar` [4] to btrfs. Then it
measures the compression ratio, extracts the tar, and deletes the tar.
Then it measures the compression ratio again, and `tar`s the extracted
files into `/dev/null`. See the benchmark file [2] for details.