FILE SYSTEM TOPICSLei Xu

Agenda Introduction VFS Optimizations Examples F&Q

Introduction “A file system is a means to organize data

expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device(s) which contain it.” – from Wikipedia Store data Organize data Access data Manage storage resources (e.g. hard drive)

Relationship to Architecture Course

Acknowledge to the slides from 830 course

Relationship to Architecture Course

File system is designed between memory and secondary storage (or remote servers) One of the most complex part in an

operating system Main R&D focuses:

Performance: throughput, latency, scalability Reliability and availability Management: snapshot and etc.

Acknowledge to the slides from 830 course

Different types of file systems

Local file systems Stored data on local hard drives, SSDs, floppy

drives, optical disks or etc. Examples: NTFS, EXT4, HFS+, ZFS

Network/distributed file systems Stored data on remote file server(s) Example: NFS, CIFS/Samba, AFP, Hadoop DFS, Ceph

Pseudo file systems Example: procfs, devfs, tmpfs

“List of file systems” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems

Agenda Introduction VFS Optimizations Examples F&Q

Overall Architecture of Linux file system components

Acknowledgement: “Anatomy of the Linux file system”, IBM developerWorks.

Virtual File System (VFS) VFS is the essential concept in UNIX-like FS

Specify an interface between the kernel and a concrete file system Introduced by SUN in 1985

Pass system calls to the underlying file systems E.g. pass sys_write() to Ext4 (i.e. ext4_write())

Three major metadata in VFS Metadata: the data about data (wikipedia) Super block, dentry and inode OO design

Each component defines a set of data members and the functions to access them

Super block A segment of metadata that describes a file

system Is constructed when mount a file system Usually, a persistent copy of super block is

stored in the beginning of a storage device Describes:

File system type, size, status (e.g. dirty bit, read only bit)

Block size, max file bytes, device size.. How to find other metadata and data. How to manipulates these data (i.e. sb_ops)

Inode “Index-node” in Unix-style file system

All information about one file (or directory) Except its name

In UNIX-like system, file names are stored in the directory file: the content of it is an “array” of file names

E.g. owner, access rights, mode, size, time and etc.

Pointers to data

Directory Entry (dentry) Dentry conceptually points a file name to

its corresponding Inode Each file/directory has a dentry presenting

it File systems use dentry to lookup a file in

the hierarchical namespace Each dentry has a pointer to the dentry of its

parent directory Each dentry of a directory has a list of dentries

of its sub-directories and sub-files

Agenda Introduction VFS Optimizations Examples F&Q

Optimizations Most of file system optimizations are

designed based on the characteristics of the memory hierarchy and storage devices. Recall:

RAM 50-100 ns Disks: 5-10 ms 2-3 orders of magnitude difference Almost all widely used local file systems are

designed for hard disk drives, which have their unique characteristics

Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Stores data on

one or more rotating disks, coated with magnetic material Introduce by IBM

in 1956 Use magnetic

head to read data

The very early HDD…..

Acknowledge to:

HDD (Cont’d) The essential structure

of HDD has not changed too much… Constitute with several

disks Each disk is divided to

tracks, each of which then is divided to sectors

The single most significant factor: Seek time

Why seek time matters When access a data (sector), the HDD head

must first move to the track (seek time), then rotates the disk to the sector (rotational time) Seek time: 3 ms on high-end server disks, 12 ms

on desktop-level disks [1] Rotational time: 5.56ms on 5400 RPM HDD,

4.17ms on 7200 RPM HDD [1] As a result, sequential IO is much faster than

random IO, because there is no seek /rotational time[1], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk-drive_performance_characteristics

General Optimizations Based on two principles:

RAM access is much faster than the access on disk

Sequential IOs is much faster than random IOs on disk

So we design file systems that Largely utilizes CPU/RAM to reduce IO to disks

(various caches/write buffers) Prefers sequential IOs

Computes disk layout to arrange related data sequentially located on disks

Dcache Dentry cache (dcache)

Directories are stored as files on disks. For each file lookup, we want obtain the inode from the

given full file path OS looks the dentries from the root to all parent directories

in the path. E.g. for looking up file “/Users/john/Documents/course.pdf”, OS

needs traverse the dentries that presents “/”, “Users”, “john”, “Documents”, and “course.pdf”

To accelerate this: We use a global hash table (dcache) to map “file path” ->

dentry A two-list solution: one for active dentries, and one for

“recent unused dentries” (LRU).

Inode cache Similar to the

dcache, OS maintains a cache for inode objects. Each inode object

has 1-to-1 relation to a dentry

If the dentry object is evicted, this inode is evicted

Page Cache …a “transparent” buffer for disk-backed pages

kept in RAM for fast access… [wikipedia] A write-back cache Main purpose: reducing the # of IOs to disks Access based on page (usually 4KB).

Page cache is per-file based. A Redix-tree in inode object. Prefetch pages to serve future read Absorb writes to reduce # of IOs

The dirty pages (modified) are flushed to disks for : 1) each 30s or 5s, or 2) OS wants to reclaim RAMs Also can be forced to flush by calling “fsync()” system call

Agenda Introduction VFS Optimizations Examples F&Q

Examples Several concrete file system designs

Ext4, classic UNIX-like file system concepts NTFS, advanced Windows file system ZFS, “the last word of file system” NFS, a standard network file system Google File System, a special distributed

file system for special requirements

Ext4 The latest version of

the “extended file system” (Ext2/3/4) The standard Linux

file system for a long time

Inspired from UFS from BSD/Solaris

Group files to block groups Keep file data near to

inodesAck: http://bit.ly/tjipWY

NTFS “New Technology

File System” (NTFS) The standard file

system in Windows world.

A Master File Table (MFT) contains all metadata. Directory is also a

file

ZFS ZFS: “the last word of file system”

The most advanced local file system in production

128 bits space (2128 bytes in theory) larger the # of sand in the earth…

A lot of advanced features: E.g. transactional commits, end-to-end integration,

snapshot, volume management and much more… Will never lose data and always be consistent.

Every OS community wants to clone or copy its features…

Btrfs on Linux, ReFS on Windows, ZFS on FreeBSD

NFS “Network File

System (NFS)” A protocol

developed by SUN in 1984 A set of RPC calls

IETF standard Supported by all

major OSs Simple and

efficient

Google File System (GFS) A large distributed file

system specially designed for MapReduce framework High throughput High availability Special designed. Not

compatible to VFS/POSIX API. Requires clients linked to

the GFS library. Hadoop DFS clones the

concepts of GFS

More File Systems Interesting file systems that are worth to explore

Btrfs (B-tree FS) from oracle, expected to be the next standard Linux file system. Many concepts are shared with ZFS.

ReFS: The file system for Windows 8 (from Microsoft). Many concepts are shared with ZFS (too!).

WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout) file system from NetApp.

FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace): a cross-platform library that allows developers to write file system running in user mode

Thanks

FAQ?