Performance improvement with zero copy technique on FUSE-based consumer devices

Junsup Song, Dongkun Shin

Abstract: FUSE is a framework to develop file systems in user space. Recently, multimedia consumer devices are adopting the FUSE file system to emulate PC-compatible FAT file system. However, FUSE file system has performance overhead due to the data copy between user space and kernel space. In this paper, we improve the performance of FUSE file system by removing the user/kernel data copy with a zero copy technique. Our experiments on a smartphone showed that the zero copy technique improves I/O performance by up to 25%.