DJFS: Providing Highly Reliable and High‐Performance File System with Small‐Sized

Abstract

File systems and applications try to implement their own update protocols to guarantee data consistency, which is one of the most crucial aspects of computing systems. However, we found that the storage devices are substantially under‐utilized when preserving data consistency because they generate massive storage write traffic with many disk cache flush operations and force‐unit‐access (FUA) commands. In this paper, we present DJFS (Delta‐Journaling File System) that provides both a high level of performance and data consistency for different applications. We made three technical contributions to achieve our goal. First, to remove all storage accesses with disk cache flush operations and FUA commands, DJFS uses small‐sized NVRAM for a file system journal. Second, to reduce the access latency and space requirements of NVRAM, DJFS attempts to journal compress the differences in the modified blocks. Finally, to relieve explicit checkpointing overhead, DJFS aggressively reflects the checkpoint transactions to file system area in the unit of the specified region. Our evaluation on TPC‐C SQLite benchmark shows that, using our novel optimization schemes, DJFS outperforms Ext4 by up to 64.2 times with only 128 MB of NVRAM.

Keywords

• High‐performance
• Journaling file system
• NVRAM
• Reliability