Abstract: Recent research has shown that applications often incorrectly implement crash consistency. We present ccfs, a file system that improves the correctness of application-level crash consistency protocols while maintaining high performance. A key idea in ccfs is the abstraction of a stream. Within a stream, updates are committed in program order, thus helping correctness; across streams, there are no ordering restrictions, thus enabling scheduling flexibility and high performance. We empirically demonstrate that applications running atop ccfs achieve high levels of crash consistency. Further, we show that ccfs performance under standard file-system benchmarks is excellent, in the worst case on par with the highest performing modes of Linux ext4, and in some cases notably better. Overall, we demonstrate that both application correctness and high performance can be realized in a modern file system.
Authors: Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Lanyue Lu, Vijay Chidambaram, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
Link: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vijay/papers/fast17-c2fs.pdf