Design and implementation of a random access file system for NVRAM

Abstract

Storage Class Memory (SCM) emerges as a potential technology because of its byte-addressability and non-volatility. However, existing file systems are not efficient for SCM because they are optimized for hard disks devices. In this paper, we propose a new file system called random access file system (RAFS), which is implemented on Linux as a prototype. In RAFS, we simplify system architecture and adopt memory mapping and XIP mechanisms to improve performance. We have analyzed and evaluated its performance with multiple workloads. Results show that RAFS outperforms Ext4 under the same condition, especially for random access scenarios.