Introduction to Log-Structured File System
Discover how the log-structured file system optimizes disk performance by converting writes into sequential transfers. Explore its foundational design, motivations behind its creation, and how it addresses challenges in traditional file systems to enhance efficiency on disks and RAID setups.
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In the early 90s, a group at Berkeley led by Professor John Ousterhout and graduate student Mendel Rosenblum developed a new file system known as the
Observations
Their motivation to do so was based on the following observations:
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System memories are growing: As memory gets bigger, more data can be cached in memory. As more data is cached, disk traffic increasingly consists of writes, as reads are serviced by the cache. Thus, file system performance is largely determined by its write performance.
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There is a large gap between random I/O performance and sequential I/O performance: ...