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Enhancement of cooperation between file systems and applications — on VFS extensions for optimized performance

增强文件系统与应用的协作一基于VFS扩展的文件系统性能优化

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Abstract

Modern operating systems incorporate an abstract layer called Virtual File System (VFS), which is positioned between user applications and real file systems to hide the differences of various file systems and to expose generic application interfaces for requesting file system services. However, VFS sometimes does not give applications an opportunity to pass information to file systems to help them make correct optimization decisions. In this paper, we review the Linux VFS, discuss its deficiencies and propose several extensions to allow applications to cooperate with the file systems more efficiently. We introduce simple prefetching interfaces and advisory flags to allow applications to communicate application-related semantics to VFS and/or the underlying file systems. These suggestions, which neither affect the semantics of applications nor modify their programming models, not only lead to simple VFS/file systems but also guide them to make correct performance-related decisions, if required. We demonstrate that these interfaces and flags are also easy to implement and can boost application performance by up to 4.29X.

抽象

创新点

现代操作系统都会整合一个虚拟文件系统的抽象层, 位于应用与物理文件系统之间, 为应用提供统一的文件系统调用接口, 屏蔽不同物理文件系统的区别. 本文提出对Linux虚拟文件系统框架的一些扩展接口, 这些接口使得应用能够传递更多的语义给虚拟或物理文件系统, 辅助文件系统进行优化, 从而更有效地与文件系统协作, 提高应用性能. 这些接口实现简单, 不影响应用的语义, 也不修改编程模型. 实验证明, 这些接口的引入可以有效提高应用性能, 最多的可以达到4.29倍.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Li Wang, XiangKe Liao, JingLing Xue & XueJun Yang

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 100049, Australia

    JingLing Xue

  3. Inktank Corporation, Los Angeles, 90017, USA

    Sage Weil

  4. Kylin Corporation, Changsha, 410073, China

    YunChuan Wen

Authors
  1. Li Wang
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  2. XiangKe Liao
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  3. JingLing Xue
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  4. Sage Weil
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  5. YunChuan Wen
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  6. XueJun Yang
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Correspondence to XiangKe Liao.

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Wang, L., Liao, X., Xue, J. et al. Enhancement of cooperation between file systems and applications — on VFS extensions for optimized performance. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 58, 1–10 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5181-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-5181-x

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