NICFS: a file system based on persistent memory and SmartNIC

Abstract

Emergence of new hardware, including persistent memory and smart network interface card (SmartNIC), has brought new opportunities to file system design. In this paper, we design and implement a new file system named NICFS based on persistent memory and SmartNIC. We divide the file system into two parts: the front end and the back end. In the front end, data writes are appended to the persistent memory in a log-structured way, leveraging the fast persistence advantage of persistent memory. In the back end, the data in logs are fetched, processed, and patched to files in the background, leveraging the processing capacity of SmartNIC. Evaluation results show that NICFS outperforms Ext4 by about 21%/10% and about 19%/50% on large and small reads/writes, respectively.

摘要

持久化内存和智能网卡等新型硬件的涌现,为文件系统架构设计带来新机遇。本文设计并实现一个基于持久化内存和智能网卡的新型文件系统NICFS。我们将NICFS分为前端与后端。在前端,数据的写入以日志结构的方式追加写到持久化内存上,从而发挥持久化内存的快速持久化优势;在后端,日志中的数据在后台被获取、处理并写入到文件中,从而充分利用智能网卡的处理能力。实验结果显示,NICFS在大粒度和小粒度的读/写性能上分别比Ext4高出约21%/10%和19%/50%。