Z-Journal: Scalable Per-Core Journaling

File system journaling critically limits the scalability of a file system because all simultaneous write operations coming from multiple cores must be serialized to be written to the journal area. Although a few scalable journaling approaches have been proposed, they required the radical redesign of file systems, or tackled only a part of the scalability bottlenecks. Per-core journaling, in which a core has its own journal stack, can clearly provide scalability. However, it requires a journal coherence mechanism because two or more cores can write to a shared file system block, so write order on the shared block must be preserved across multiple journals. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable per-core journal design. The proposed design allows a core to commit independently to other cores. The journal transactions involved in shared blocks are linked together through order-preserving transaction chaining to form a transaction order graph. The ordering constraints later will be imposed during the checkpoint process. Because the proposed design is self-contained in the journal layer and does not rely on the file system, its implementation, Z-journal, can easily replace JBD2, the generic journal layer. Our evaluation with FxMark, SysBench and Filebench running on the ext4 file system in an 80-core server showed that it outperformed the current JBD2 by up to approx. 4000 %.