- Abutalib Aghayev
- Theodore Ts’o
- Garth Gibson
- Peter Desnoyers
Abstract
Drive-Managed SMR (ShingledMagnetic Recording) disks offer a plug-compatible higher-capacity replacement for conventional disks. For non-sequential workloads, these disks show bimodal behavior: After a short period of high throughput they enter a continuous period of low throughput.
We introduce ext4-lazy, a small change to the Linux ext4 file system that significantly improves the throughput in both modes. We present benchmarks on four different drive-managed SMR disks from two vendors, showing that ext4-lazy achieves 1.7-5.4x improvement over ext4 on a metadata-light file server benchmark. On metadata-heavy benchmarks it achieves 2-13x improvement over ext4 on drive-managed SMR disks as well as on conventional disks.
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