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HotOS X, Tenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems — Abstract
Stupid File Systems Are Better
Lex Stein,
Harvard University
Abstract
File systems were originally designed for hosts with
only one disk. Over the past 20 years, a number of increasingly complicated changes have optimized the performance of file systems on a single disk. Over the
same time, storage systems have advanced on their own,
separated from file systems by the narrow block interface. Storage systems have increasingly employed parallelism and virtualization. Parallelism seeks to increase
throughput and strengthen fault-tolerance. Virtualization
employs additional levels of data addressing indirection
to improve system flexibility and lower administration
costs. Do the optimizations of file systems make sense
for current storage systems? In this paper, I show that
the performance of a current advanced local file system
is sensitive to the virtualization parameters of its storage
system. Sometimes random block layout outperforms
smart file system layout. In addition, random block layout stabilizes performance across several virtualization
parameters. This approach has the advantage of immunizing file systems to changes in their underlying storage
systems.
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