An enhanced journaling method for clustered file system with shared storage

Abstract

Most modern file systems provide journaling method instead of traditional file system check routine for fast recovery and consistency guarantee from unexpected crashes. For clustered file systems with shared storage, to improve the performance of journaling, each node gets its own journal space and each journal can be on its own disk for greater parallelism. After a failure, file system consistency is restored quickly by simply re-applying all updates recorded in the failed node's journal. However, for file system operations involving multiple nodes, this method may not be efficient enough as lock mechanism has to be employed in most cases, which may cause poorer performance and more recovery time. By introducing specific journal storage to record the transactions involving multiple nodes, an enhanced lock-free journaling method is presented in this paper, which can improve the performance of journaling operations involving multiple nodes, and then shortens recovery time from crashes. A Linux-based concept-proofing implementation has been applied in self-developed clustered file system.