Adding parity to the Linux ext3 file system
Himani Apte, Meenali Rungta · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 2007
Modern disks no longer operate in a simple "fail-stop" manner, yet commodity operating systems assume they do. We design and implement a parity based approach to improve the robustness of journaling file systems. We modify the existing ext3 file system for data and ordered journaling modes to incorporate parity and call it the "Parity File System". Using PFS, we are able to recover from a single latent sector error or silent block corruption within a given file. We show that the performance overhead for PFS compared to ext3 is minimal while the robustness is significantly improved.