TPFS: A High-Performance Tiered File System for Persistent Memories and Disks

Emerging fast, byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) promises substantial storage performance gains compared with traditional disks. We present TPFS, a tiered file system that combines PM and slow disks to create a storage system with near-PM performance and large capacity. TPFS steers incoming file input/output (I/O) to PM, dynamic random access memory (DRAM), or disk depending on the synchronicity, write size, and read frequency. TPFS profiles the application’s access stream online to predict the behavior of file access. In the background, TPFS estimates the “temperature” of file data and migrates the write-cold and read-hot file data from PM to disks. To fully utilize disk bandwidth, TPFS coalesces data blocks into large, sequential writes. Experimental results show that with a small amount of PM and a large solid-state drive (SSD), TPFS achieves up to 7.3× and 7.9× throughput improvement compared with EXT4 and XFS running on an SSD alone, respectively. As the amount of PM grows, TPFS’s performance improves until it matches the performance of a PM-only file system.