Consideration of fsync() of the Ext4 File System According to Kernel Version

Seongbae Son, Yoenjin Noh, Dokeun Lee, Sungsoon Park, Youjip Won

http://doi.org/

Ext4 file system is widely used in various computing environments such as those of the PC, the server, and the Linux-based embedded system. Ext4, which uses a buffer for block I/O, provides fsync() system call to applications to guarantee the consistency of a specific file. A log of the analytical studies regarding the operation of Ext4 and the improvement of its performance has been compiled, but it has not been studied in detail in terms of kernel versions. We figure out that the behavior of fsync() system call is different depending on the kernel version. Between the kernel versions of 3.4.0 and 4.7.2, 3.4.0, 3.8.0, and 4.6.2 showed behavioral differences regarding the fsync() system call. The latency of fsync() in kernel 3.4.0 is longer than that of the more-advanced 3.7.10; meanwhile, the characteristics of 3.8.0 enabled the disruption of the Ext4 journaling order, but the ordered defect was solved with 4.6.2.