USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, General Track Abstract
Pp. 105120 of the Proceedings
Analysis and Evolution of Journaling File Systems
Vijayan Prabhakaran, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Abstract
We develop and apply two new methods for analyzing file system
behavior and evaluating file system changes. First, semantic
block-level analysis (SBA) combines knowledge of on-disk data
structures with a trace of disk traffic to infer file system
behavior; in contrast to standard benchmarking approaches, SBA
enables users to understand why the file system behaves as it
does. Second, semantic trace playback (STP) enables traces of
disk traffic to be easily modified to represent changes in the file
system implementation; in contrast to directly modifying the file system, STP
enables users to rapidly gauge the benefits of new policies.
We use SBA to analyze Linux ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and Windows NTFS; in the process, we
uncover many strengths and weaknesses of these journaling file systems. We
also apply STP to evaluate several modifications to ext3, demonstrating
the benefits of various optimizations without incurring the costs of a real
implementation.
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