Coerced Cache Eviction and Discreet Mode Journaling: Dealing with Misbehaving Disks

by Abhishek Rajimwale, Vijay Chidambaram, Deepak Ramamurthi, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau

We present Coerced Cache Eviction (CCE), a new method to force writes to disk in the presence of a disk cache that does not properly obey write-cache configuration or flush requests. We demonstrate the utility of CCE by building a new journaling mode within the Linux ext3 file system. When mounted in this discreet mode, ext3 uses CCEs to ensure that writes are properly ordered and thus maintains file system integrity despite the presence of an improperly behaving disk. We show that discreet mode journaling operates with acceptable overheads for most workloads. READ FULL ARTICLE (login required) »