Shortcut-JFS: A write efficient journaling file system for phase change memory

Abstract

Journaling file systems are widely used in modern computer systems as it provides high reliability with reasonable performance. However, existing journaling file systems are not efficient for emerging PCM (Phase Change Memory) storage. Specifically, a large amount of write operations performed by journaling incur serious performance degradation of PCM storage as it has long write latency. In this paper, we present a new journaling file system for PCM, called Shortcut-JFS, that reduces write amount of journaling by more than a half exploiting the byte-accessibility of PCM. Specifically, Shortcut-JFS performs two novel schemes, 1) differential logging that performs journaling only for modified bytes and 2) in-place checkpointing that removes unnecessary block copy overhead. We implemented Shortcut-JFS on Linux 2.6, and measured the performance of Shortcut-JFS and legacy journaling schemes used in ext 3. The results show that the performance improvement of Shortcut-JFS against ext 3 is 40% on average.