Conquest: Better Performance Through a Disk/Persistent-RAM Hybrid File System
An-I Wang, Peter L. Reiher, Gerald J. Popek, Geoff Kuenning · 2002
Abstract ¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ The rapidly declining cost of persistent RAM technologies prompts the question of when, not whether, such memory will become the preferred storage medium for many computers. Conquest is a file system that provides a transition from disk to persistent RAM as the primary storage medium. Conquest provides two specialized and simplified data paths to in-core and on-disk storage, and Conquest realizes most of the benefits of persistent RAM at a fractional cost of a RAM-only solution. As of October 2001, Conquest can be used effectively for a hardware cost of under $200. We compare Conquest’s performance to ext2, reiserfs, SGI XFS, and ramfs, using popular benchmarks. Our measurements show that Conquest incurs little overhead compared to ramfs. Compared to the disk-based file systems, Conquest achieves 24 % to 1900 % faster memory performance, and 43 % to 96% faster performance when exercising both memory and disk. 1