The Full Path to Full-Path Indexing

Full-path indexing can improve I/O efficiency for workloads that operate on data organized using traditional, hierarchical directories, because data is placed on persistent storage in scan order. Prior results indicate, however, that renames in a local file system with fullpath indexing are prohibitively expensive. This paper shows how to use full-path indexing in a file system to realize fast directory scans, writes, and renames. The paper introduces a range-rename mechanism for efficient key-space changes in a write-optimized dictionary. This mechanism is encapsulated in the key-value API and simplifies the overall file system design. We implemented this mechanism in BetrFS, an inkernel, local file system for Linux. This new version, BetrFS 0.4, performs recursive greps 1.5x faster and random writes 1.2x faster than BetrFS 0.3, but renames are competitive with indirection-based file systems for a range of sizes. BetrFS 0.4 outperforms BetrFS 0.3, as well as traditional file systems, such as ext4, XFS, and ZFS, across a variety of workloads.