Design and Implementation of a File System that Considers the Space Efficiency of NVRAM

Nonvolatile memory technology is evolving continuously and commercial products such as FeRAM and PRAM are now challenging their markets. As NVRAM has properties of both memory and storage, it can store persistent data objects while allowing fast and random access. To utilize NVRAM for general purpose storing of frequently updated data across power disruptions, some essential features of the file system including naming, recovery, and space management are required while exploiting memory-like properties of NVRAM. Conventional file systems, including even recently developed NVRAM file systems, show very low space efficiency wasting more than 50% of the total space in some cases. To efficiently utilize the relatively expensive NVRAM, we design and implement a new extent-based space-thrifty file system, which we call NEBFS (NVRAM Extent-Based File System). We analyze and compare the space utilization of conventional file systems with NEBFS and validate the results with experimental results observed from running the file system implementations on a system with actual NVRAM installed as well as on systems emulating NVRAM. We show that NEBFS has high space efficiency compared to conventional file systems.