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We present SplitFS, a file system for persistent memory (PM) that reduces software overhead significantly compared to state-of-the-art PM file systems. SplitFS presents a novel split of responsibilities between a user-space library file system and an existing kernel PM file system. The user-space library file system handles data operations by intercepting POSIX calls, memory-mapping the underlying file, and serving the read and overwrites using processor loads and stores. Metadata operations are handled by the kernel PM file system (ext4 DAX). SplitFS introduces a new primitive termed relink to efficiently support file appends and atomic data operations. SplitFS provides three consistency modes, which different applications can choose from, without interfering with each other. SplitFS reduces software overhead by up-to 4× compared to the NOVA PM file system, and 17× compared to ext4 DAX. On a number of micro-benchmarks and applications such as the LevelDB key-value store running the YCSB benchmark, SplitFS increases application performance by up to 2× compared to ext4 DAX and NOVA while providing similar consistency guarantees.
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MadFS: Per-File Virtualization for Userspace Persistent Memory Filesystems
Persistent memory (PM) can be accessed directly from userspace without kernel involvement, but most PM filesystems still perform metadata operations in the kernel for secuity and rely on the kernel for cross-process synchronization. We present per-file virtualization, where a virtualization layer implements a complete set of file functionalities, including metadata management, crash consistency, and concurrency control, in userspace. We observe that not all file metadata need to be maintained by the kernel and propose embedding insensitive metadata into the file for userspace management. For crash consistency, copy-on-write (CoW) benefits from the embedding of the block mapping since the mapping can be efficiently updated without kernel involvement. For cross-process synchronization, we introduce lockfree optimistic concurrency control (OCC) at user level, which tolerates process crashes and provides better scalability. Based on per-file virtualization, we implement MadFS, a library PM filesystem that maintains the embedded metadata as a compact log. Experimental results show that on concurrent workloads, MadFS achieves up to 3.6× the throughput of ext4-DAX. For real-world applications, MadFS provides up to 48% speedup for YCSB on LevelDB and 85% for TPC-C on SQLite compared to NOVA.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1900758
- PAR ID:
- 10476649
- Publisher / Repository:
- USENIX Association
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of 21st USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’23)
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Persistent memory file system userspace synchronization
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Santa Clara, CA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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