Design and Reliability of a User Space Write-Ahead Log in Rust

TL;DR

This paper presents a user space write-ahead log implemented in Rust, demonstrating its reliability, ease of use, and minimal performance overhead for fault-tolerance in data recovery.

Contribution

The paper introduces a Rust-based user space WAL prototype, highlighting its reliability, ease of development, and near-native performance on stable memory devices.

Findings

Rust is easy to use and has a rich library ecosystem.

The WAL prototype operates with minimal overhead.

Performance is comparable to stable memory device expectations.

Abstract

Write-ahead logs (WALs) are a fundamental fault-tolerance technique found in many areas of computer science. WALs must be reliable while maintaining high performance, because all operations will be written to the WAL to ensure their stability. Without reliability a WAL is useless, because its utility is tied to its ability to recover data after a failure. In this paper we describe our experience creating a prototype user space WAL in Rust. We observed that Rust is easy to use, compact and has a very rich set of libraries. More importantly, we have found that the overhead is minimal, with the WAL prototype operating at basically the expected performance of the stable memory device.