Linux 7.4 may make read-only file opens ~39% faster
A VFS patch queued for Linux 7.4 lets do_dentry_open() consume an already-held terminal dentry reference instead of taking and dropping redundant references during pathname lookup. The five-revision series reports a 39% increase in read-only open() operations in will-it-scale on a 20-core VM.
That is a focused microbenchmark, not an end-to-end application result, but the change is unusually small and targets a hot path after more than two years of iteration.