Implementation of a Linux log-structured file system with a garbage collector
Martin Jambor, Tomáš Hrubý, Jan Taus, Kuba Krchak, Viliam Holub · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 2007
In many workloads, most write operations performed on a file system modify only a small number of blocks. The log-structured file system was designed for such a workload, additionally with the aim of fast crash recovery and system snapshots. Surprisingly, although implemented for Berkeley Sprite and BSD systems, there was no complete implementation for the current Linux kernel. In this paper, we present a complete implementation of the log-structured file system for the Linux kernel, which includes a user-space garbage collector and additional tools. We evaluate the measurements obtained in several test cases and compare the results with widely-used ext3.