ZTE Communications ›› 2018, Vol. 16 ›› Issue (3): 59-66.DOI: 10.19729/j.cnki.1673-5188.2018.03.010

• Review • Previous Articles    

Persistent Data Layout in File Systems

LUO Shengmei1, LU Youyou2, YANG Hongzhang1, SHU Jiwu2, ZHANG Jiacheng2   

  1. 1.ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen 518057, China
    2.Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
  • Online:2018-08-25 Published:2020-03-18
  • About author:LUO Shengmei (luo.shengmei@zte.com.cn) received his master’s degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, China. He has been working with ZTE Corporation for over 20 years. His research interests include cloud computing and big data. He is a member of CIE and CCF.|LU Youyou (luyouyou@tsinghua.edu.cn) received the B.S. degree from Nanjing University, China in 2009 and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University, China in 2015, both in computer science. He is currently an assistant researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His current research interests include nonvolatile memories and file systems. He received the best paper award at IEEE NVMSA’14 and the best paper runner-up at MSST’15. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and CCF.|YANG Hongzhang (yang.hongzhang@zte.com.cn) received his master’s degree in computer science and technology from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China in 2015. He has been working with ZTE Corporation for 3 years. His research interests include distributed file system and cloud computing. His paper on pNFS was received by HPCA’15. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM and CCF.|SHU Jiwu (shujw@tsinghua.edu.cn) received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China. He is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China. His current research interests include nonvolatile memories and file systems. He is IEEE Fellow and CCF Fellow.|ZHANG Jiacheng (zhang-jc13@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn) received the B.S. degree from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in software engineering in 2013 and is now a Ph.D. candidate student in Tsinghua University, China, majoring in computer science. His current research interests include nonvolatile memories and storage system. His paper on flash-based file system was received by USENIX ATC’16.
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by ZTE Industry-Academia-Research Cooperation Funds.

Abstract:

Data layout in a file system is the organization of data stored in external storages. The data layout has a huge impact on performance of storage systems. We survey three main kinds of data layout in traditional file systems: in-place update file system, log-structured file system, and copy-on-write file system. Each file system has its own strengths and weaknesses under different circumstances. We also include a recent usage of persistent layout in a file system that combines both flash memory and byte-addressable non-volatile memory. With this survey, we conclude that persistent data layout in file systems may evolve dramatically in the era of emerging non-volatile memory.

Key words: data layout, file system, persistent storage, solid state drive (SSD)