XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 18 August 2026 at 05:35 AM EDT. 1 Comment
LINUX STORAGE
The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES.

Introduced back in Linux 6.17 was FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES as a fallocate() flag for efficiently zeroing out a specified file or range. Via NVMe Deallocate or similar SCSI standards can allow for offloading the zeroing out of the file/range for better efficiency and performance over user-space manually zeroing out or pre-initializing a file.

More details on the FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES functionality can be found in the original article on the topic, Linux 6.17 Will Allow Writing Zeroes More Efficiently To SSDs. When merged last year the EXT4 file-system was the first one implementing FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES support while now XFS is ready to go with Linux 7.3.

XFS FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES


The rest of the XFS updates for Linux 7.3 are routine bug fixes and code improvements.
1 Comment
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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