A Storage Slab Allocator for Disk Storage Management in File System

Absorbing the slab idea for memory management, this paper presents a novel technique for the disk storage management called a storage slab allocator. A storage slab allocator doesnpsilat discard the file layout during the process of deleting files, but reuses the free file layout while creating, thereby both block allocation and release will be speeded up. The file layout is the cached-object as the free storage management unit. It maintains the free blocks and their relations. The prototype system is implemented based on Ext3 and tests are also done. Measured performance results are very promising. Compared with Ext3, the allocation performance is improved to about double times and bigger file deletion is improved to hundreds of times; meanwhile, the CPU utilization is reduced to about 40%.