Optimizing file systems for fast storage devices

Abstract

Emerging high-performance storage devices have attractive features such as low latency and high throughput. This leads to a rapid increase in the demand for fast storage devices in cloud platforms, social network services, etc. However, there are few block-based file systems that are capable of utilizing superior characteristics of fast storage devices. In this paper, we find that the I/O strategy of modern operating systems prevents file systems from exploiting fast storage devices. To address this problem, we propose several optimization techniques for block-based file systems. Then, we apply our techniques to two well-known file systems and evaluate them with multiple benchmarks. The experimental results show that our optimized file systems achieve 32% on average and up to 54% better performance than existing file systems.