Reconstruct the Directories for In-Memory File Systems

Abstract

Existing path lookup routines in file systems need to construct an auxiliary index in memory or traverse the dentries of the directory file sequentially, which brings either heavy writes or large timing cost. This paper designs a novel path lookup mechanism, Content-Indexed Browsing (CIB), for file systems on persistent memory, in which the structure of directory files is an exclusive index that can be searched in $O(log(n))$ time. We implement CIB in a real persistent memory file system, PMFS, denoted by CIB-PMFS. Comprehensive evaluations show that CIB can achieve times of performance improvement over the conventional lookup schemes in PMFS, and brings 20.4\% improvement on the overall performance of PMFS. Furthermore, CIB reduces the writes on persistent memory by orders of magnitude comparing with existing extra index schemes.