Evolving EXT4 for shingled disks

Abutalib Aghayev, Theodore Ts'O, Garth Gibson, Peter Desnoyers

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

47 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Drive-Managed SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) disks offer a plug-compatible higher-capacity replacement for conventional disks. For non-sequential workloads, these disks show bimodal behavior: After a short period of high throughput they enter a continuous period of low throughput. We introduce ext4-lazy1, a small change to the Linux ext4 file system that significantly improves the throughput in both modes. We present benchmarks on four different drive-managed SMR disks from two vendors, showing that ext4-lazy achieves 1.7-5.4× improvement over ext4 on a metadata-light file server benchmark. On metadata-heavy benchmarks it achieves 2-13× improvement over ext4 on drive-managed SMR disks as well as on conventional disks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2017
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages105-119
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781931971362
StatePublished - 2017
Event15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2017 - Santa Clara, United States
Duration: Feb 27 2017Mar 2 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2017

Conference

Conference15th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, FAST 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Clara
Period2/27/173/2/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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