Abstract
The emergence of non-volatile memories (NVM) brings new opportunities and challenges to data management system design. As an important part of the data management systems, several new file systems are developed to take advantage of the characteristics of NVM. However, these NVM-aware file systems are usually designed and evaluated based on simulations or emulations. In order to explore the performance and characteristics of these file systems on real hardware, in this article, we provide an empirical evaluation of NVM-aware file systems on the first commercially available byte-addressable NVM (i.e., the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (DCPMM)). First, to compare the performance difference between traditional file systems and NVM-aware file systems, we evaluate the performance of Ext4, XFS, F2FS, Ext4-DAX, XFS-DAX, and NOVA file systems on DCPMMs. To compare DCPMMs with other secondary storage devices, we also conduct the same evaluations on Optane SSDs and NAND-flash SSDs. Second, we observe how remote NUMA node access and device mapper striping affect the performance of DCPMMs. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the database (i.e., MySQL) on DCPMMs with Ext4 and Ext4-DAX file systems. We summarize several observations from the evaluation results and performance analysis. We anticipate that these observations will provide implications for various memory and storage systems.
Highlights
Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as spin–torque transfer memory [1], phase change memory [2], resistive memory [3], and Intel and Micron’s 3DXPoint technology [4] promise to revolutionize I/O performance
In order to understand the performance differences between NVMaware file systems and traditional file systems on NVM devices, we evaluate the performance of NVM-aware file systems and traditional file systems at various workloads on
Because new devices do not always guarantee better results in all cases, in order to help researchers and system designers make better choices about which storage devices to use when designing future systems, we evaluate the performance of these file systems on Intel Optane SSDs [12] and NVMe SSDs to compare the performance differences and characteristics of each file system under different storage devices
Summary
Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies, such as spin–torque transfer memory [1], phase change memory [2], resistive memory [3], and Intel and Micron’s 3D. Because new devices do not always guarantee better results in all cases, in order to help researchers and system designers make better choices about which storage devices to use when designing future systems, we evaluate the performance of these file systems on Intel Optane SSDs [12] and NVMe SSDs to compare the performance differences and characteristics of each file system under different storage devices. We obtain the following observations that may be useful for future system design: (1) Direct Access has a significant improvement on file system write performance, but has a smaller impact on read performance. We evaluated and analyzed the performance of file systems on DCPMMs by using file system benchmarks (e.g., FIO [14] and Filebench [15]). We analyze the results of each evaluation in more detail
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