The following paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the USENIX 1996 Annual Technical Conference San Diego, California, January 1996 Scalability in the XFS File System Adam Sweeney Silicon Graphics For more information about USENIX Association contact: 1. Phone: 510 528-8649 2. FAX: 510 548-5738 3. Email: [email protected] 4. WWW URL: http://www.usenix.org Scalability in the XFS File System Adam Sweeney, Doug Doucette, Wei Hu, Curtis Anderson, Mike Nishimoto, and Geoff Peck Silicon Graphics, Inc. Abstract uses an asynchronous write ahead logging scheme for In this paper we describe the architecture and design protecting complex metadata updates and allowing of a new file system, XFS, for Silicon Graphics’ IRIX fast file system recovery after a crash. We also support operating system. It is a general purpose file system very high throughput file I/O using large, parallel I/O for use on both workstations and servers. The focus of requests and DMA to transfer data directly between the paper is on the mechanisms used by XFS to scale user buffers and the underlying disk drives. These capacity and performance in supporting very large file mechanisms allow us to recover even very large file systems. The large file system support includes mech- systems after a crash in typically less than 15 seconds, anisms for managing large files, large numbers of to manage very large file systems efficiently, and to files, large directories, and very high performance I/O. perform file I/O at hardware speeds that can exceed 300 MB/sec. In discussing the mechanisms used for scalability we include both descriptions of the XFS on-disk data XFS has been shipping to customers since December structures and analyses of why they were chosen. We of 1994 in a version of IRIX 5.3, and XFS will be the discuss in detail our use of B+ trees in place of many default file system installed on all SGI systems start- of the more traditional linear file system structures. ing with the release of IRIX 6.2 in early 1996. The file system is stable and is being used on production XFS has been shipping to customers since December servers throughout Silicon Graphics and at many of of 1994 in a version of IRIX 5.3, and we are continu- our customers’ sites. ing to improve its performance and add features in upcoming releases. We include performance results In the rest of this paper we describe why we chose to from running on the latest version of XFS to demon- focus on scalability in the design of XFS and the strate the viability of our design. mechanisms that are the result of that focus. We start with an explanation of why we chose to start from scratch rather than enhancing the old IRIX file sys- 1. Introduction tem. We next describe the overall architecture of XFS, XFS is the next generation local file system for Sili- followed by the specific mechanisms of XFS which con Graphics’ workstations and servers. It is a general allow it to scale in both capacity and performance. purpose Unix file system that runs on workstations Finally, we present performance results from running with 16 megabytes of memory and a single disk drive on real systems to demonstrate the success of the XFS and also on large SMP network servers with gigabytes design. of memory and terabytes of disk capacity. In this paper we describe the XFS file system with a focus on 2. Why a New File System? the mechanisms it uses to manage large file systems on large computer systems. The file system literature began predicting the coming of the "I/O bottleneck" years ago [Ousterhout90], and The most notable mechanism used by XFS to increase we experienced it first hand at SGI. The problem was the scalability of the file system is the pervasive use of not the I/O performance of our hardware, but the limi- B+ trees [Comer79]. B+ trees are used for tracking tations imposed by the old IRIX file system, EFS free extents in the file system rather than bitmaps. B+ [SGI92]. EFS is similar to the Berkeley Fast File Sys- trees are used to index directory entries rather than tem [McKusick84] in structure, but it uses extents using linear lookup structures. B+ trees are used to rather than individual blocks for file space allocation manage file extent maps that overflow the number of and I/O. EFS could not support file systems greater direct pointers kept in the inodes. Finally, B+ trees are than 8 gigabytes in size, files greater than 2 gigabytes used to keep track of dynamically allocated inodes in size, or give applications access to the full I/O scattered throughout the file system. In addition, XFS bandwidth of the hardware on which they were running. EFS was not designed with large systems and 3. Scalability Problems Addressed by file systems in mind, and it was faltering under the XFS pressure coming from the needs of new applications In designing XFS, we focused in on the specific prob- and the capabilities of new hardware. While we con- lems with EFS and other existing file systems that we sidered enhancing EFS to meet these new demands, felt we needed to address. In this section we consider the required changes were so great that we decided it several of the specific scalability problems addressed would be better to replace EFS with an entirely new in the design of XFS and why the mechanisms used in file system designed with these new demands in mind. other file systems are not sufficient. One example of a new application that places new demands on the file system is the storage and retrieval Slow Crash Recovery of uncompressed video. This requires approximately A file system with a crash recovery procedure that is 30 MB/sec of I/O throughput for a single stream, and dependent on the file system size cannot be practically just one hour of such video requires 108 gigabytes of used on large systems, because the data on the system disk storage. While most people work with com- is unavailable for an unacceptably long period after a pressed video to make the I/O throughput and capac- crash. EFS and file systems based on the BSD Fast ity requirements easier to manage, many customers, File System [McKusick84] falter in this area due to for example those involved in professional video edit- their dependence on a file system scavenger program ing, come to SGI looking to work with uncompressed to restore the file system to a consistent state after a video. Another video storage example that influenced crash. Running fsck over an 8 gigabyte file system the design of XFS is a video on demand server, such with a few hundred thousand inodes today takes a few as the one being deployed by Time Warner in minutes. This is already too slow to satisfy modern Orlando. These servers store thousands of compressed availability requirements, and the time it takes to movies. One thousand typical movies take up around recover in this way only gets worse when applied to 2.7 terabytes of disk space. Playing two hundred high larger file systems with more files. Most recently quality 0.5 MB/sec MPEG streams concurrently uses designed file systems apply database recovery tech- 100 MB/sec of I/O bandwidth. Applications with sim- niques to their metadata recovery procedure to avoid ilar requirements are appearing in database and scien- this pitfall. tific computing, where file system scalability and per- formance is sometimes more important than CPU per- Inability to Support Large File Systems formance. The requirements we derived from these applications were support for terabytes of disk space, We needed a file system that could manage even huge files, and hundreds of megabytes per second of petabytes of storage, but all of the file systems we I/O bandwidth. know of are limited to either a few gigabytes or a few terabytes in size. EFS is limited to only 8 gigabytes in We also needed to ensure that the file system could size. These limitations stem from the use of data provide access to the full capabilities and capacity of structures that don’t scale, for example the bitmap in our hardware, and to do so with a minimal amount of EFS, and from the use of 32 bit block pointers overhead. This meant supporting systems with multi- throughout the on-disk structures of the file system. ple terabytes of disk capacity. With today’s 9 gigabyte The 32 bit block pointers can address at most 4 billion disk drives it only takes 112 disk drives to surpass 1 blocks, so even with an 8 kilobyte block size the file terabyte of storage capacity. These requirements also system is limited to a theoretical maximum of 32 ter- meant providing access to the large amount of disk abytes in size. bandwidth that is available in such high capacity sys- tems. Today, SGI’s high end systems have demon- Inability to Support Large, Sparse Files strated sustained disk bandwidths in excess of 500 megabytes per second. We needed to make that band- None of the file systems we looked at support full 64 width available to applications using the file system. bit, sparse files. EFS did not support sparse files at all. Finally, these requirements meant doing all of this Most others use the block mapping scheme created for without using unreasonable portions of the available FFS. We decided early on that we would manage CPU and memory on the systems.