Coerced Cache Eviction and discreet mode journaling: Dealing with misbehaving disks
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Rajimwale, Abhishek; Chidambaram, Vijay; Ramamurthi, Deepak; Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H.
- Source
- 2011 IEEE/IFIP 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks (DSN) Dependable Systems & Networks (DSN), 2011 IEEE/IFIP 41st International Conference on. :518-529 Jun, 2011
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Drives
Media
Disk drives
Industries
Reliability
Computer crashes
Writing
file systems
disks
journaling
reliability
- Language
- ISSN
- 1530-0889
2158-3927
We present Coerced Cache Eviction (CCE), a new method to force writes to disk in the presence of a disk cache that does not properly obey write-cache configuration or flush requests. We demonstrate the utility of CCE by building a new journaling mode within the Linux ext3 file system. When mounted in this discreet mode, ext3 uses CCEs to ensure that writes are properly ordered and thus maintains file system integrity despite the presence of an improperly behaving disk. We show that discreet mode journaling operates with acceptable overheads for most workloads.