FusionFS: Fusing I/O Operations using CISCOps in Firmware File Systems

We present FusionFS, a direct-access firmware-level in-storage filesystem that exploits the near-storage computational capability for fast I/O and data processing, consequently reducing I/O bottlenecks. In FusionFS, we introduce a new abstraction, CISCOps, that combines multiple I/O and data processing operations into one fused operation and offloaded for near-storage processing. By offloading, CISCOps significantly reduces dominant I/O overheads such as system calls, data movement, communication, and other software overheads. Further, to enhance the use of CISCOps, we introduce MicroTx for fine-grained crash consistency and fast (automatic) recovery of I/O and data processing operations. We also explore scheduling techniques to ensure fair and efficient use of in-storage compute and memory resources across tenants. Evaluation of FusionFS against the state-of-the-art user-level, kernel-level, and firmware-level file systems using microbenchmarks, macrobenchmarks, and real-world applications shows up to 6.12X, 5.09X and 2.07X performance gains, and 2.65X faster recovery for applications.