TXFS: Leveraging file-system crash consistency to provide acid transactions

Abstract

We introduce TxFS, a novel 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 journal), and full ACID transactions. We port SQLite and Git to use TxFS, and experimentally show that TxFS provides strong crash consistency while providing equal or better performance.