ChunkFS: A Recovery-Driven File System Design Approach

Recovery of file system is becoming more and more significant as file system checking time is increasing due to increase in disk capacities with relatively low increase in disk bandwidth and insignificant improvement in seek time. With current file systems and the disk capacity trends, the file system checking time is likely to go up by a factor of 10 by 2013. We take a recovery driven file system design approach by dividing the file system into small chunks, which are complete file systems by themselves. The spanning of the files and directories across multiple chunks is addressed in such a way that there is minimal cross-chunk dependencies thus allowing skipping of non-dirty chunks when checking the file system. This way the amount of file system that needs checking is reduced down to the number of chunks that are dirty.