An Empirical Evaluation of NVM-Aware File Systems on Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules

The emergence of non-volatile memories (NVM) brings new opportunities and challenges to data management system design. As an important part of the data management systems, several new file systems are developed to take advantage of the characteristics of NVM. However, these NVM-aware file systems are usually designed and evaluated based on simulations or emulations. In order to explore the performance and characteristics of these file systems on real hardware, in this article, we provide an empirical evaluation of NVM-aware file systems on the first commercially available byte-addressable NVM (i.e., the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module (DCPMM)). First, to compare the performance difference between traditional file systems and NVM-aware file systems, we evaluate the performance of Ext4, XFS, F2FS, Ext4-DAX, XFS-DAX, and NOVA file systems on DCPMMs. To compare DCPMMs with other secondary storage devices, we also conduct the same evaluations on Optane SSDs and NAND-flash SSDs. Second, we observe how remote NUMA node access and device mapper striping affect the performance of DCPMMs. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the database (i.e., MySQL) on DCPMMs with Ext4 and Ext4-DAX file systems. We summarize several observations from the evaluation results and performance analysis. We anticipate that these observations will provide implications for various memory and storage systems.