Zheng Liu from Alibaba lead the topic about ext4. The most important change in EXT-series filesystem this year is: ext3 has gone, people could only use ext3 by mount ext4 with special arguments in latest kernel (actually, in CentOS 7.0). Encrypt feature has complete in ext4.
Robin Dong (Yes, it’s me) from Alibaba give a presentation about cold storage (Slide is here). We develop distributed storage system based on a small open-source software called “sheepdog“, and modified it heavily to improve data recovery performance and make sure it could run in low-end but high-density storage servers.


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Discussion in tea break

Yanhai Zhu from Alibaba (We have done so much works on storage) lead a topic about cache in virtual machines environment. Alibaba choose Bcache as code base to develop a new cache software.
Robin: Why Bcache? Why not flashcache?
Yanhai: I started my work on flashcache first, but flashcache is not profit to the product environment. First, flashcache is unfriendly to sequential-write. Second, it use hash data structure to distributed IO requests at beginning, which will split the cache data in multi-tenant environment. Bcache use B-tree instead of hash-table to store data, it’s better for our requirements.
They use radical write-back strategy on cache. It works very well because the cache sequentialize the write IOs and make backend easy to absorb the pressure peak.
The last topic is lead by Zhongjie Wu from Memblaze, a famous startup company in China on flash storage technology. It’s about NVDIMM, the most hot hardware technology in recent years. A NVDIMM is not expensive, it is only a DDR DIMM with a capacitance. Memblaze has develop a new 1U storage server with a NVDIMM and many flash cards. It contain their own developed OS and could use Fabric-Channel/Ethernet to connect to client. The main purpose of NVDIMM is to reduce latency, and they use write-back strategy(Surely).
The big problem they face with NVDIMM is CPU can’t flush data in its L1 cache to NVDIMM when whole server powers down. To solve this problem, Memblaze use write-combining in CPU multi-cores, it hurts the performance a little but avoid the data missing finally.

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All the staff in this CLSF 2015

Articles from other attenders:
https://blogs.oracle.com/linuxkernel/entry/china_linux_storage_and_file1