Virtual Log Based File Systems for a Programmable Disk

In this paper, we study how to minimize the latency of small transactional writes to disks. The basic approach is to write to free sectors that are near the current disk head location by leveragingthe embedded processor core inside the disk. We develop a number of analytical models to demonstrate the performance potential of this approach. We then present the design of a variation of a log-structured le system based on the concept of a virtual log, which supports fast small transactional writes without extra hardware support. We compare our approach against traditional update-in-place and logging systems by modifying the Solaris kernel to serve as a simulation engine. [via]

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/19...