The Design and Implementation of Log-Structure File System

M. Rosenblum and J. Ousterhout

Introduction
CPU Speed increases dramatically Memory Size increased
Most Read hits in cache

Disk improves only on the size but access is still very slow due to seek and rotational latency
Write must go to disk eventually

As a result
Write dominate the traffic Application has disk-bound problem

Overview of LFS
Unix FFS
Random write Scan entire disk Very slow restore consistency after crash

LFS
Write new data to disk in sequence Eliminate seek Faster crash recovery The most recent log always at the end

Traditional Unix FFS

Spread information around the disk
Layout file sequentially but physically separates different files Inode separate from file contents

Takes at least 5 I/O for each seek to create new file Causes too many small access Only use 5% disk bandwidth
Most of the time spent on seeking

Sprite LFS
Inode not at fixed position It written to the log Use inode map to maintain the current location of the inode It divided into blocks and store in the log Most of the time in cache for fast access (rarely need disk access) A fixed checkpoint on each disk store all the inode map location Only one single write of all information to disk required + inode map update All information in a single contiguous segment

Compare FFS/LFS
Task Allocate disk address FFS Block creation LFS Segment Write Appended to log Lookup in i-node map

Allocate i-node Fixed location Map anode Static numbers into address disk addresses Maintain free Bitmap space

Cleaner Segment usage table

Space Management
Goal: keep large free extents to write new data Disk divided into segments (512kB/1MB) Sprite Segment Cleaner
Threading between segments Copying within segment

Threading
Leave the live data in place Thread the log through the free extents Cons
Free space become many fragmented Large contiguous write wont be possible LFS cant access faster

Copying and Compacted

Copy live data out of the log Compact the data when it written back Cons: Costly

Segment Cleaning Mechanism

Read a number of Segments into memory Check if it is live data If true, write it back to a smaller number of clean segments Mark segment as clean

Segment summary block

Identify each piece of information in segment Version number + inode = UID Version number incremented in inode map when file deleted If UID of block mismatch to that in inode map when scanned, discard the block

Cleaning Policies
Sprite starts cleaning segment when the number of clean segment drops below a threshold It uses the write cost to compare the cleaning policies
"write cost" is the average amount of time the disk is busy per byte of new data written total bytes read and written N N u N 1 u 2 Write cost 1 u new data written N 1 u

Disk space underutilized via performance

u < 0.8 will give better performance compare to current Unix FFS u < 0.5 will give better performance compare to the improved Unix FFS

Simulate more real situation

Data random access pattern
Uniform Hot and cold 10% is hot and select 90% of the time 90% is cold and select 10% of the time

Cleaner use Greedy Policy

Choose the least-utilized segment to clean

Conclude hot and cold data should treat differently

Cost Benefit Policy

Cold data is more stable and will likely last longer Assume Cold data = older (age) Clean segment with higher ratio Group by age before rewrite
benefit free space generated age 1 u age cost cost 1 u

Cost Benefit Result

Left: bimodal distribution achieved Cold cleaned at u=75%, hot at u=15% Right: cost-benefit better, especially at utilization>60%

Crash Recovery
Traditional Unix FFS:
Scan all metadata Very costly especially for large storage

Sprite LFS
Last operations locate at the end of the log Fast access, recovery quicker Checkpoint & roll-forward Roll-forward hasnt integrated to Sprite while the paper was written Not focus here

Micro-benchmarks (small files)

Fig (a)

Fig (b)

Shows performance of large number of files create, read and delete LFS 10 times faster than Sun OS in create and delete LFS kept the disk 17% busy while SunOS kept the disk busy 85% Predicts LFS will improve by another factor of 4-6 as CPUs get faster No improvement can be expected in SunOS

Micro-benchmarks (large files)

100Mbyte file (with sequential, random) write, then read back sequentially LFS gets higher write bandwidth Same read bandwidth in both FS In the case of reads require seek (reread) in LFS, the performance is lower than SunOS

- SunOS: pay additional cost for organizing disk Layout - LFS: group information created at the same time, not optimal for reading randomly written files

Real Usage Statistics

Previous result doesnt include cleaning overhead The table shows better prediction This real 4 months usage includes cleaning overhead Write cost range is 1.2-1.6 More than half of cleaned segments empty Cleaning overhead limits write performance about 70% of the bandwidth for sequential writing In practice, possible to perform the cleaning at night or idle period

Thank You =)
~The end~