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Comment by georgeaf99 | Hacker News Reader

Simon Peter, at UT Austin, has been working on a file system that works better for systems with NVM. It looks like existing file systems (e.g. EXT4) are going to suck in this new paradigm (DRAM -> NVM -> SSD) . It’s a pretty interesting read and the benchmarks are damn impressive.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~simon/sosp17-final207.pdf

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Disclaimer: I work at Intel on PMDK (pmem.io)

There's been a lot of interesting research around file systems for persistent memory.

One that shows a lot of promise is NOVA [0]. Its focus is on making full us on this new type of memory. And it's not just pure research, they are attempting to get NOVA included into Linux kernel [1, 2].

And while talking about file systems, we shouldn't forget about the effort that was put into modifying the existing ones to support DAX (Direct Access) [3, 4].

[0] - http://nvsl.ucsd.edu/index.php?path=projects/nova

[1] - https://lwn.net/Articles/729812/

[2] - https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/5/188

[3] - https://lwn.net/Articles/717953/

[4] - https://lwn.net/Articles/731706/

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

It didn’t even occur to me that the file systems will need to change to fully take advantage of NVRAM. I wonder at what point the abstraction will stop leaking and require another higher layer to account for differences in performance. I’m sure the OS will need tuning, but applications might not unless they’re pretty bare metal.

One of the reasons why Apple's new file system APFS was developed was optimization for flash storage. HFS+ was designed with floppy and spinning disks in mind.

What notable changes did APFS implement to accommodate flash storage?

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