DFUSE: Strongly Consistent Write-Back Kernel Caching for Distributed Userspace File Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Haoyu, Fu, Jingkai, Li, Qing, Hsu, Windsor, Cidon, Asaf
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Haoyu
Fu, Jingkai
Li, Qing
Hsu, Windsor
Cidon, Asaf
author_facet Li, Haoyu
Fu, Jingkai
Li, Qing
Hsu, Windsor
Cidon, Asaf
contents Cloud platforms host thousands of tenants that demand POSIX semantics, high throughput, and rapid evolution from their storage layer. Kernel-native distributed file systems supply raw speed, but their privileged code base couples every release to the kernel, widens the blast radius of crashes, and slows innovation. FUSE-based distributed file systems flip those trade-offs: they run in user space for fast deployment and strong fault isolation, yet the FUSE interface disables the kernel's write-back page cache whenever strong consistency is required. Practitioners must therefore choose between (i) weak consistency with fast write-back caching or (ii) strong consistency with slow write-through I/O, a limitation that has kept FUSE distributed file systems out of write-intensive cloud workloads. To this end, we present DFUSE, the first distributed FUSE file system that delivers write-back kernel caching and strong consistency. DFUSE achieves this by offloading userspace consistency control to the kernel driver, allowing coordinated access to the kernel's page cache across nodes. This design eliminates blind local cache updates and ensures cluster-wide strong consistency without compromising performance. In our evaluation, DFUSE achieves up to 68.0% higher throughput and 40.4% lower latency than the existing write-through design of FUSE-based distributed file systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_18191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DFUSE: Strongly Consistent Write-Back Kernel Caching for Distributed Userspace File Systems
Li, Haoyu
Fu, Jingkai
Li, Qing
Hsu, Windsor
Cidon, Asaf
Operating Systems
Cloud platforms host thousands of tenants that demand POSIX semantics, high throughput, and rapid evolution from their storage layer. Kernel-native distributed file systems supply raw speed, but their privileged code base couples every release to the kernel, widens the blast radius of crashes, and slows innovation. FUSE-based distributed file systems flip those trade-offs: they run in user space for fast deployment and strong fault isolation, yet the FUSE interface disables the kernel's write-back page cache whenever strong consistency is required. Practitioners must therefore choose between (i) weak consistency with fast write-back caching or (ii) strong consistency with slow write-through I/O, a limitation that has kept FUSE distributed file systems out of write-intensive cloud workloads. To this end, we present DFUSE, the first distributed FUSE file system that delivers write-back kernel caching and strong consistency. DFUSE achieves this by offloading userspace consistency control to the kernel driver, allowing coordinated access to the kernel's page cache across nodes. This design eliminates blind local cache updates and ensures cluster-wide strong consistency without compromising performance. In our evaluation, DFUSE achieves up to 68.0% higher throughput and 40.4% lower latency than the existing write-through design of FUSE-based distributed file systems.
title DFUSE: Strongly Consistent Write-Back Kernel Caching for Distributed Userspace File Systems
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18191