DualFS

What is DualFS?

DualFS is a new high performance journaling file system that puts data and meta-data on different devices (usually, two partitions on the same disk), and manages them in very different ways. Unlike other journaling file systems, DualFS has only one copy of every meta-data block. This copy is in the meta-data device, a log which is used by DualFS both to read and to write meta-data blocks. By avoiding a time-expensive extra copy of meta-data blocks, DualFS can achieve a good performance as compared to other journaling file systems. Indeed, we have implemented a DualFS prototype, which has been evaluated with microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks, and we have found that DualFS greatly reduces the total I/O time taken by the file system in most cases (up to 97%).

Technical Reports

• Bursting File-System Performance by Disk Specialization.
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  Computer Engineering Department, University of Murcia, UM-DITEC-2000-3.
  July, 2000.

• Improving the Performance of New-Generation Journaling File Systems through Meta-Data Prefetching and On-Line Relocation.
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  Computer Engineering Department, University of Murcia, UM-DITEC-2003-5.
  September, 2002.

• Implementation of a New-Generation Journaling File System in Linux.
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  Computer Engineering Department, University of Murcia, UM-DITEC-2004-3.
  September, 2004.

Conference Papers

• DualFS: A New Journaling File System Without Meta-Data Duplication
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  16th Annual ACM International Conference on Supercomputing.
  New York City, June 22-26, 2002

• DualFS: Toward A New Journaling File
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  XIII Jornadas de Paralelismo.
  Lleida (Spain), September 9-11, 2002

• Traditional versus Next-Generation Journaling File Systems: a Performance Comparison Approach.
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  2nd Workshop on Hardware and Software Support for High Performance Scientific and Engineering Computing (SHPSEC03). Held in conjuction with The 12th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT-03).
  New Orleans, Louisiana (USA), September 27-28, 2003

• DualFS: A New Journaling File System for Linux
  Juan Piernas, and Sorin Faibish.
  2007 Linux Storage & Filesystem Workshop.
  San Jose, California (USA), February 12-13, 2007.
  
  • PDF

Journal Papers

• Traditional File Systems versus DualFS: a Performance Comparison Approach
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN: 0916-8532)
  Vol.E87-D No.7 p. 1703 -- 1711, July 2004
  
  • Available on-line

• Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a New Journaling File System with Data and Meta-data Separation (thesis overview)
  J. Piernas Cánovas.
  Journal of Computer Science & Technology (ISSN: 1666-6038)
  Vol. 5 - No. 1 - p. 44, April 2005
  
  • Available on-line

• The Design of New Journaling File Systems: the DualFS Case
  J. Piernas, T. Cortes, and J. M. García.
  IEEE Transactions on Computers (ISSN: 0018-9340)
  Vol. 56 - No. 2 - p. 267 -- 281, February 2007
  
  • Available on-line

Thesis

• Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a New Journaling File System with Data and Meta-data Separation
  J. Piernas Cánovas.
  Advisors: Toni Cortes, and José M. García Carrasco.
  October 29th, 2004.
  University of Murcia (Spain)
  

Source Code & Tools

DualFS source code and tools are available at SourceForge.