DurableFS: a file system for NVRAM

• Published in: CSI TRANSACTIONS ON ICT Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 277 - 286
• Main Authors: Kalita, Chandan, Barua, Gautam, Sehgal, Priya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Nature B.V 2019
• Subjects: Durability; Performance degradation
• ISSN: 2277-9078; 2277-9086
• DOI: 10.1007/s40012-019-00215-0

With the availability of hybrid DRAM and NVRAM memory on the memory bus of CPUs, a number of file systems on NVRAM have been designed and implemented. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a file system on NVRAM called DurableFS, which provides atomicity and durability of file operations to applications. It provides ACID properties to transactions involving multiple files. Due to the byte level random accessibility of memory, it is possible to provide these guarantees without much overhead. We use standard techniques like copy on write for data, and a redo log for metadata changes to build an efficient file system which provides durability and atomicity guarantees to transactions. Benchmarks on the implementation shows that there is only a 7% degradation in performance due to providing these guarantees.