On-demand snapshot: An efficient versioning file system for phase-change memory

Eunji Lee, Jee E. Jang, Taeseok Kim, Hyokyung Bahn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

33 Scopus citations

Abstract

Versioning file systems are widely used in modern computer systems as they provide system recovery and old data access functions by retaining previous file system snapshots. However, existing versioning file systems do not perform well with the emerging PCM (phase-change memory) storage, because they are optimized for hard disks. Specifically, a large amount of additional writes incurred by maintaining snapshot degrades the performance of PCM seriously as write operations are the performance bottleneck of PCM. This paper presents a novel versioning file system, designed for PCM, that reduces the writing overhead of a snapshot significantly. Unlike existing versioning file systems that incur cascade writes up to the file system root, our scheme breaks the recursive update chain at the immediate parent level. The proposed file system is implemented on Linux 2.6 as a prototype. Measurement studies with various I/O benchmarks show that the proposed file system improves the I/O throughput by 144 percent on average, compared to ZFS, a representative versioning file system.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6466325
Pages (from-to)2841-2853
Number of pages13
JournalIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Volume25
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013

Keywords

  • File system
  • Phase-change memory
  • Reliability
  • Snapshot
  • Versioning

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