NILFS: A File System to Make SSDs Scream

It’s difficult to write storage articles at this time and not focus on the upcoming 2.6.30 kernel. Why? This kernel is loaded with a number of new file systems — some of which we’ve already covered, like ext4 and btrfs. Another of the hot new file systems that is in 2.6.30 is NILFS. This file system is definitely one that you should be testing.

NILFS2 (New Implementation of a Log-Structured File System Version 2) is a very promising new log-structured file system that has continuous snapshots and versioning of the entire file system. This means that you can recover files that were deleted or unintentionally modified as well as perform backups at any time from a snapshot without a performance penalty normally associated with creating snapshots. In addition, there is evidence that NILFS has extremely good performance on SSD drives.