TxFS: Leveraging File-System Crash Consistency to Provide ACID Transactions

Authors: 

Yige Hu, Zhiting Zhu, Ian Neal, Youngjin Kwon, and Tianyu Cheng, The University of Texas at Austin; Vijay Chidambaram, The University of Texas at Austin and VMware Research; Emmett Witchel, The University of Texas at Austin
Awarded Best Paper!

Abstract: 

We introduce TxFS, a novel transactional file system that builds upon a file system’s atomic-update mechanism such as journaling. Though prior work has explored a number of transactional file systems, TxFS has a unique set of properties: a simple API, portability across different hardware, high performance, low complexity (by building on the journal), and full ACID transactions. We port SQLite and Git to use TxFS, and experimentally show that TxFS provides strong crash consistency while providing equal or better performance.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {215985,
author = {Yige Hu and Zhiting Zhu and Ian Neal and Youngjin Kwon and Tianyu Cheng and Vijay Chidambaram and Emmett Witchel},
title = {{TxFS}: Leveraging {File-System} Crash Consistency to Provide {ACID} Transactions},
booktitle = {2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 18)},
year = {2018},
isbn = {978-1-939133-01-4},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {879--891},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc18/presentation/hu},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}

Presentation Audio