BuffetFS: Serve Yourself Permission Checks without Remote Procedure Calls

TL;DR

BuffetFS is a user-level file system that reduces RPC latency by handling permission checks locally, significantly improving performance especially when accessing many small files in distributed storage systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel permission check mechanism that eliminates RPCs during file open operations, enhancing I/O performance in distributed file systems.

Findings

Up to 70% performance improvement over Lustre

Reduces RPCs during file open operations

Optimizes access to numerous small files

Abstract

The remote procedure call (a.k.a. RPC) latency becomes increasingly significant in a distributed file system. We propose BuffetFS, a user-level file system that optimizes I/O performance by eliminating the RPCs caused by \texttt{open()} operation. By leveraging \texttt{open()} from file servers to clients, BuffetFS can restrain the procedure calls for permission checks locally, hence avoid RPCs during the initial stage to access a file. BuffetFS can further reduce response time when users are accessing a large number of small files. We implement a BuffetFS prototype and integrate it into a storage cluster. Our preliminary evaluation results show that BuffetFS can offer up to 70\% performance gain compared to the Lustre file system.