Practical techniques for purging deleted data using liveness information

13 years 11 months ago

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The layered design of the Linux operating system hides the liveness of file system data from the underlying block layers. This lack of liveness information prevents the storage system from discarding blocks deleted by the file system, often resulting in poor utilization, security problems, inefficient caching, and migration overheads. In this paper, we define a generic "purge" operation that can be used by a file system to pass liveness information to the block layer with minimal changes in the layer interfaces, allowing the storage system to discard deleted data. We present three approaches for implementing such a purge operation: direct call, zero blocks, and flagged writes, each of which differs in their architectural complexity and potential performance overhead. We evaluate the feasibility of these techniques through a reference implementation of a dynamically resizable copy on write (COW) data store in User Mode Linux (UML). Performance results obtained from this refer...

David Boutcher, Abhishek Chandra

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