A File System for Intelligent Disks
Our latest work on xFS has focused on the use of intelligent I/O
processors. In this talk, we explore the role of a programmable disk
processor in improving file system performance. Existing file systems
suffer from two common fundamental assumptions that handicap their
designs: that a small disk write is intrinsically expensive and that
reorganizing the disk layout is a heavy-weight operation. By
dedicating part of the storage management to the intelligent embedded
disk processor, we are faced with the opportunity of rethinking a new
file system paradigm based on low-latency persistent writes and
light-weight reorganization. This is possible because the IDISK file
system is able to take advantage of its intimage knowledge of both of
the underlying disk mechanisms and file system semantics. We have
developed a number of analytical models which guide the construction
of efficient IDISK allocation algorithms. Preliminary simulation
results promise significant performance improvement.
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