| | |
Summary: 11
Membrane: Operating System Support for
Restartable File Systems
SWAMINATHAN SUNDARARAMAN, SRIRAM SUBRAMANIAN, ABHISHEK
RAJIMWALE, ANDREA C. ARPACI-DUSSEAU, REMZI H. ARPACI-DUSSEAU,
and MICHAEL M. SWIFT
University of Wisconsin-Madison
We introduce Membrane, a set of changes to the operating system to support restartable file
systems. Membrane allows an operating system to tolerate a broad class of file system failures,
and does so while remaining transparent to running applications; upon failure, the file system
restarts, its state is restored, and pending application requests are serviced as if no failure had
occurred. Membrane provides transparent recovery through a lightweight logging and checkpoint
infrastructure, and includes novel techniques to improve performance and correctness of its fault-
anticipation and recovery machinery. We tested Membrane with ext2, ext3, and VFAT. Through
experimentation, we show that Membrane induces little performance overhead and can tolerate
a wide range of file system crashes. More critically, Membrane does so with little or no change to
existing file systems, thus improving robustness to crashes without mandating intrusive changes
to existing file-system code.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.4.5 [Operating Systems]: Reliability--Fault-tolerance
General Terms: Design, Algorithms, Reliability
|
