Adaptive filesystem compression for embedded systems

  • Authors:
  • Lan S. Bai;Haris Lekatsas;Robert P. Dick

  • Affiliations:
  • Northwestern University, Evanston, IL;Vorras Corporation, Princeton, NJ;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Embedded system secondary storage size is often constrained, yet storage demands are growing as a result of increasing application complexity and storage of personal data and multimedia files. Filesystem compression offers a solution. This paper formalizes the problem of automatic filesystem compression using multiple compression algorithms. The average latency of on-line file accesses is optimized under a constraint on filesystem capacity. Our solution is based on predictive control. Predicted latency implications are used to solve the file compression state selection problem using a multiple choice knapsack problem formulation. This approach is evaluated on filesystem traces and compared with other efficient heuristics. Our approach results in 34.1% reduction in file access latency compared to a straight-forward heuristic that decompresses frequently-accessed files and compresses least recently used files with more aggressive compression algorithms. It reduces file access latency by 67.7% compared to uniformly compressing files to the shallowest level required to meet storage capacity constraints.