ZonFS: A Storage Class Memory File System with Memory Zone Partitioning on Linux

Jang Woong Kim, Jae Hoon Kim, Awais Khan, Youngjae Kim, Sungyong Park

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent developments in storage class memory such as PCM, MRAM, RRAM, and STT-RAM have strengthened their leadership as storage media for memory-based file systems. Traditional Linux memory-based file systems such as Ramfs and Tmpfs utilize the Linux page cache as a file system. These file systems, when adopted as a file system for SCM, have the following problems. First, current implementation of Ramfs and Tmpfs has no mechanism to explicitly allocate pages from specific memory. Second, memory pages allocated from SCM do not have to follow the Linux kernel's page allocation process exactly. This results in unnecessary performance overhead. To resolve the aforementioned challenges, we propose the development of ZonFS, a memory-based file system using Memory Zone Partitioning. ZonFS is implemented by extending the Linux Ramfs. In particular, we defined a memory zone for SCM, modified the Ramfs to allocate a file system page from SCM. ZonFS implementation avoids running unnecessary Linux VM codes such as (i) inserting a page allocated from SCM into the LRU list for VM page replacement and (ii) checking dirty pages for write back to disk. We also modified the Ramfs to allocate inode cache in SCM and eliminated the risk of inode cache loss in case of power failure. Extensive evaluation indicates that ZonFS has up to 9.1% and 13.8% higher I/O throughputs than native Ramfs and Tmpfs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2017 IEEE 2nd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, FAS*W 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages277-282
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781509065585
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 9 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event2nd IEEE International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, FAS*W 2017 - Tucson, United States
Duration: Sep 18 2017Sep 22 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2017 IEEE 2nd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, FAS*W 2017

Conference

Conference2nd IEEE International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems, FAS*W 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityTucson
Period09/18/1709/22/17

Funding

We thank Preethika Kasu for her proofreading and constructive comments that have improved the paper. This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2017R1D1A1B03032763) and Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (No.B0101-16-0644, Research on High Performance and Scalable Manycore Operating System).

FundersFunder number
Ministry of EducationNRF-2017R1D1A1B03032763
Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning
National Research Foundation of Korea
Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion

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