Improving Periodic Flush Overhead of File Systems Using Non-volatile Buffer Cache

Eunji Lee, Hyojung Kang, Kern Koh, Hyokyung Bahn

http://doi.org/

File I/O buffer cache plays an important role in narrowing the wide speed gap between the main memory and the secondary storage. However, data loss or inconsistencies may occur if the system crashes before the data that has been updated in the buffer cache is flushed to storage. Thus, most operating systems adopt a daemon that periodically flushes dirty data to the secondary storage. In this study, we show that periodic flushes account for 30-70% of the total write traffic to storage and remove this inefficiency by implementing a small, non-volatile buffer cache. Specifically, we present space-efficient management techniques, such as delta-write and fragment-grouping, and show that the storage write traffic and throughput can be improved by a margin of 44.2% and 23.6%, respectively, with only a small NVRAM.