ResearchIndex

publisher:

Kluwer Academic Publishers

pages:

26--52

volume:

10

number:

1

month:

feb

abstract:

This paper presents a new technique for disk storage management called a log-structured file system. A logstructured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and crash recovery. The log is the only structure on disk; it contains indexing information so that files can be read back from the log efficiently. In order to maintain large free areas on disk for fast writing, we divide the log into segments and use a segment cleaner to compress the live information from heavily fragmented segments. We present a series of simulations that demonstrate the efficiency of a simple cleaning policy based on cost and benefit. We have implemented a prototype logstructured file system called Sprite LFS; it outperforms current Unix file systems by an order of magnitude for small-file writes while matching or exceeding Unix performance for reads and large writes. Even when the overhead for cleaning is included, Sprite LFS can ...

institution:

University of California at Berkeley

address:

Asilomar, Pacific Grove, CA

booktitle:

Proceedings of the 13th {ACM} Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

type:

misc

series:

Operating Systems Review

note:

appeared also in TOCS

journal:

ACM Transactions on Computer Systems

year:

1991

school:

University of California, Berkeley, Dec.

annote:

Mendel Rosenblum (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences , Computer Science Division; University of California; Berkeley , CA 94720); John K. Ousterhout (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences