Quantitative Analysis of File System Performance on NVM

NVM is a new type of storage media that supports both non-volatility and byte-addressability. These features enable to make use of various performance improvement techniques such as direct access, in-place update, and fine-grained logging. In this paper, we analyze performance of six file systems, namely Ext3/4, XFS, F2FS, FAT and PMFS, on NVM using various workloads. Our analysis reveals that PMFS, the file system originally designed for NVM, shows the best performance for most workloads. In addition, we observe that Ext3/4-DAX and XFS-DAX outperforms their counterparts, Ext3/4 and XFS, for read-intensive workloads. However, they perform similarly or even worse for write-intensive workloads, implying that there is still much room for improvement in the current DAX implementation.