TxFS: Leveraging File-system Crash Consistency to Provide ACID Transactions

Yige Hu, Zhiting Zhu, Ian Neal, Youngjin Kwon, Tianyu Cheng, Vijay Chidambaram, Emmett Witchel

Abstract: We introduce TxFS, a transactional file system that builds upon a file system’s atomic-update mechanism such as journaling. Though prior work has explored a number of transactional file systems, TxFS has a unique set of properties: a simple API, portability across different hardware, high performance, low complexity (by building on the file-system journal), and full ACID transactions. We port SQLite, OpenLDAP, and Git to use TxFS and experimentally show that TxFS provides strong crash consistency while providing equal or better performance.