The Rio File Cache: Surviving Operating System Crashes

: One of the fundamental limits to high-performance, high-reliability file systems is memory's vulnerability to system crashes. Because memory is viewed as unsafe, systems periodically write data back to disk. The extra disk traffic lowers performance, and the delay period before data is safe lowers reliability. The goal of the Rio (RAM I/O) file cache is to make ordinary main memory safe for persistent storage by enabling memory to survive operating system crashes. Reliable memory enables a system to achieve the best of both worlds: reliability equivalent to a write-through file cache, where every write is instantly safe, and performance equivalent to a pure write-back cache, with no reliability-induced writes to disk. To achieve reliability, we protect memory during a crash and restore it during a reboot (a "warm" reboot). Extensive crash tests show that even without protection, warm reboot enables memory to achieve reliability close to that of a write-through file sys...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Peter M. Chen, Wee Teck Ng, Subhachandra Chandra, Christopher M. Aycock, Gurushankar Rajamani, David E. Lowell
• Keywords: ASPLOS 1996, File Cache, File System, Programming Languages, Write-through File