Consistency without ordering

  • Authors:

  • Vijay Chidambaram;Tushar Sharma;Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau;Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison

  • Venue:
  • FAST'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Modern file systems use ordering points to maintain consistency in the face of system crashes. However, such ordering leads to lower performance, higher complexity, and a strong and perhaps naive dependence on lower layers to correctly enforce the ordering of writes. In this paper, we introduce the No-Order File System (NoFS), a simple, lightweight file system that employs a novel technique called backpointer-based consistency to provide crash consistency without ordering writes as they go to disk. We utilize a formal model to prove that NoFS provides data consistency in the event of system crashes; we show through experiments that NoFS is robust to such crashes, and delivers excellent performance across a range of workloads. Backpointer-based consistency thus allows NoFS to provide crash consistency without resorting to the heavyweight machinery of traditional approaches.