Introducing Windows New File System: ReFS(弹性文件系统)

Nearly 20 yearsago Microsoft introduced the New Technology File System as part of Windows NT. Sincethen NTFS has accumulated numerous features that, while promising at the time,turned out to be bad ideas. Meanwhile the state of the art has continued toadvance in ways that are incompatible with the NTFS architecture. After acouple of failed starts, Microsoft is now promising a new file system.

Known as ReFSor Resilient File System, this new filesystem is designed to improve reliability, especially in the event of powerloss or media degradation (i.e. the disk simply wearing out). Some of thisreliability comes from fundamentally changing where and how file metadata isstored and updated. Rather than using in-place updates paired with ajournal, metadata is updated using allocate-on-write semantics. If the powerdoes go out during a write the file system simply continues using the oldmetadata entry rather than the partially written new one.

ReFS is compatiblewith the disk-spanning technology Storage Spaces. By itselfStorage Spaces has several ways to improve performance and reliability,especially when dealing with catastrophic disk failure. Unfortunately there aresubtler forms of data corruption that can occur. Using a checksum system, ReFScan detect when these errors occur. When that happens it then polls all of theStorage Spaces drives to determine which has a good copy of the file.

In order toproactively ensure drive and file integrity, ReFS will occasionally spot checkfiles using a background process. This process compares the metadata andcontent of each copy of a file and, like in the example above, uses the goodcopies to correct the others. This is particularly important for rarelyaccessed files where corruption in one copy may not otherwise be caught beforeother copies happen to be corrupted as well.

Anotherreliability mechanism is what they are calling “integrity streams”. Just likemetadata, integrity streams will use allocate-on-write semantics to reduce thechance that a failure while writing to disk will result in corruption of theonly good copy of the file’s content. Integrity streams are not appropriate forall types of files; applications that require control over the physical filestructure (e.g. databases) should disable this feature.

In order toimprove compatibility ReFS has been built to run under the NTFS APIs with onlythe lowest levels swapped out. That said, there are numerous NTFS features thatwill not be supported in ReFS including:

• Named streams
• Object IDs
• Short names
• Compression
• File level encryption (EFS)
• User data transactions
• Sparse Files
• Hard-links
• Extended attributes
• Quotas

Other featuressuch as “BitLocker encryption, Access Control Lists for security, USN journal,change notifications, symbolic links, junction points, mount points, reparsepoints, volume snapshots, file IDs, and oplocks” will still be supported.

The initialrelease of ReFS will be targeting file servers. This means it will only beavailable on Windows 8 Server and will not support bootable drives. Over timeReFS will be offered to client versions of Windows and eventually may be usedas a boot drive. Given how dangerous flaws are when it comes to file systems,Microsoft felt that this go-slow approach would be more prudent.

One cannot performan in-place conversion from NTFS to ReFS, a new drive must be created and thedata copied across.