TxFS Linux File-System Supports ACID Transactions, Simple API

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Storage on 15 July 2018 at 12:49 AM EDT. 16 Comments
LINUX STORAGE
Presented at this past week's 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC18) was TxFS, the Texas Transactional File System for Linux.

Texas Transactional File System (TxFS) has been in the works for a number of years and is a transactional file-system that offers a simple API, wide range of hardware support, high performance while supporting ACID transactions, and relatively low complexity.

TxFS has been worked on by the University of Texas at Austin as well as VMware Research. Papers on TxFS have been published before but their ATC18 paper can be found here (PDF).

One of the professors involved in this work has also tweeted some different remarks including the file-system is down to just five thousand lines of code by utilizing the file-system journal, how they provided isolation for TxFS transactions, and its very simple API of just three system calls.

The code to TxFS is hosted on GitHub but sadly it's only patched against the out-of-date Linux 3.18 kernel at this stage. It remains to be seen if this researchers will ever attempt to upstream the Texas Transactional File-System.
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