The scheme is named after its creator Grigoriy Orlov, who first posted, in 2000, a brief description and implementation for OpenBSD[1] of the technique, which was later used in the BSD Fast Filesystem kernel variants.
If /home lives in the root filesystem, a simple chattr command will make the system treat it as a top-level directory.
The Orlov block allocator was shown to offer performance gains on workloads that traverse directory trees[2] on FreeBSD.
The results are promising: the time required to traverse through a Linux kernel tree was reduced by roughly 30%.
The Orlov scheme needs more rigorous benchmarking; it also needs some serious stress testing to demonstrate that performance does not degrade as the filesystem is changed over time.