A patch by open-source developer Matheus Alves de Almeida aims to improve FAT32 performance on Linux when the filesystem is mounted synchronously. The change batches writes to FAT mirrors and improves how those writes are submitted.
The Linux FAT driver currently synchronizes data one buffer at a time on synchronous mounts, serializing I/O and reducing performance. Benchmarks of the proposed change on FAT32 with a synchronous mount showed improvements of up to 4.06x.
The patch is currently in Andrew Morton’s mm-everything branch. Based on its current path and timing, it could be included in Linux 7.5, though that is not yet confirmed.
Sources: Phoronix.