Jing Liu, Microsoft Research; Yifan Dai, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Awarded Best Paper!
We introduce Ananke, a high-performance filesystem microkernel service that provides transparent recovery from unexpected filesystem failures. Ananke does so by leveraging the unique opportunity of the microkernels, running a small amount of recovery code coordinated by the host OS at the moment of a process crash. Ananke can record key pieces of information not usually available during full-system crash recovery, enabling fast and transparent recovery for applications. Through over 30,000 fault-injection experiments, we demonstrate that Ananke achieves lossless recovery; we also show that Ananke recovers quickly, usually in a few hundred milliseconds. Through real application workloads, we show that Ananke delivers high performance in the common case; the extra work needed to detect faults and prepare for recovery incurs minimal overheads.
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This content is available to:
author = {Jing Liu and Yifan Dai and Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau},
title = {Fast, Transparent Filesystem Microkernel Recovery with Ananke},
booktitle = {23rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 25)},
year = {2025},
isbn = {978-1-939133-45-8},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {1--18},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast25/presentation/liu-jing},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}