Title
An empirical study of file systems on NVM
Abstract
Emerging byte-addressable, non-volatile memory like phase-change memory, STT-MRAM, etc. brings persistence at latencies within an order of magnitude of DRAM, thereby motivating their inclusion on the memory bus. According to some recent work on NVM, traditional file systems are ineffective and sub-optimal in accessing data from this low latency media. However, there exists no systematic performance study across different file systems and their various configurations validating this point. In this work, we evaluate the performance of various legacy Linux file systems under various real world workloads on non-volatile memory (NVM) simulated using ramdisk and compare it against NVM optimized file system - PMFS. Our results show that while the default file system configurations are mostly sub-optimal for NVM, these legacy file systems can be tuned using mount and format options to achieve performance that is comparable to NVM-aware file system such as PMFS. Our experiments show that the performance difference between PMFS and ext2/ext3 with execute-in-place (XIP) option is around 5% for many workloads (TPCC and YCSB). Furthermore, based on the learning from our performance study, we present few key file system features such as in-place update layout with XIP, and parallel metadata and data allocations, etc. that could be leveraged by file system designers to improve performance of both legacy and new file systems for NVM.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/MSST.2015.7208283
2015 31st Symposium on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST)
Keywords
Field
DocType
file system,non-volatile memory,performance
File system,File Control Block,Flash file system,Self-certifying File System,Computer science,Unix file types,Versioning file system,Memory-mapped file,Operating system,Computer file
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2160-195X
14
0.60
References 
Authors
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Priya Sehgal11046.00
Sourav Basu2140.60
Kiran Srinivasan32299.88
Kaladhar Voruganti449742.73