Scale and Performance in a Filesystem Semi-Microkernel

We present uFS, a user-level filesystem semi-microkernel. uFS takes advantage of a high-performance storage development kit to realize a fully-functional, crash-consistent, highly-scalable filesystem, with relative developer ease. uFS delivers scalable high performance with a number of novel techniques: careful partitioning of in-memory and on-disk data structures to enable concurrent access without locking, inode migration for balancing load across filesystem threads, and a dynamic scaling algorithm for determining the number of filesystem threads to serve the current workload. Through measurements, we show that uFS has good base performance and excellent scalability; for example, uFS delivers nearly twice the throughput of ext4 for LevelDB on YCSB workloads.