A new eight-patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list targets scalability improvements in the MD RAID5 software RAID implementation. The patches focus on reducing per-stripe and stripe-cache contention, particularly benefiting systems with many CPU cores and many disks. Benchmarks show neutral impact at the default single handling thread, with gains peaking around 10–17% when using approximately 4 worker threads. Write-heavy workloads continue to benefit at higher thread counts, while read-heavy high-concurrency cases saturate earlier. The patches are described as low-risk and are currently awaiting code review on LKML.
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