An empirical study of file systems on NVM

— Emerging byte-addressable, non-volatile memory like phase-change memory, STT-MRAM, etc. brings persistence at latencies within an order of magnitude of DRAM, thereby motivating their inclusion on the memory bus. According to some recent work on NVM, traditional file systems are ineffective and sub-optimal in accessing data from this low latency media. However, there exists no systematic performance study across different file systems and their various configurations validating this point. In this work, we evaluate the performance of various legacy Linux file systems under various real world workloads on non-volatile memory (NVM) simulated using ramdisk and compare it against NVM optimized file system -- PMFS. Our results show that while the default file system configurations are mostly sub-optimal for NVM, these legacy file systems can be tuned using mount and format options to achieve performance that is comparable to NVM-aware file system such as PMFS. Our experiments show that t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MSS
• Authors: Priya Sehgal, Sourav Basu, Kiran Srinivasan, Kaladhar Voruganti
• Keywords: Hardware, MSS 2015