Consistency Without Ordering

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Author(s): Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C.; Sharma, Tushar; Chidambaram, Vijay
Citation: TR1709
Date: Jan 2012
Subject(s): file-system consistency; file-system design
Abstract: Modern file systems use ordering points to maintain consistency in the face of system crashes. However, such ordering leads to lower performance, higher complexity, and a strong and perhaps naive dependence on lower layers to correctly enforce the ordering of writes. In this paper, we introduce the No-Order File System (NoFS), a simple, lightweight file system that employs a novel technique called backpointer-based consistency to provide crash consistency without ordering writes as they go to disk. We utilize a formal model to prove that NoFS provides data consistency in the event of system crashes; we show through experiments that NoFS is robust to such crashes, and delivers excellent performance across a range of workloads. Backpointer-based consistency thus allows NoFS to provide crash consistency without resorting to the heavyweight machinery of traditional approaches.
Description: This is an extended version of the paper published in the 10th Usenix conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 12).
Permanent link: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/61251
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