• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.678-682
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• 2010

Compressed filesystem is frequently used in the embedded system to increase cost efficiency. One of the drawbacks of compressed filesystem is low read performance. Moreover, read-ahead mechanism that improves the read throughput of storage device has negative effect on the read performance of compressed filesystem, increasing read latency. Main reason is that compressed filesystem has too big read-ahead miss penalty due to decompression overhead. To solve this problem, this paper proposes new read technique considering kernel read-ahead mechanism for compressed filesystem. Proposed technique improves read throughput of device by bulk read from device and reduces decompression overhead of compressed filesystem by selective decompression. We implement proposed technique by modifying CramFS and evaluate our implementation in the Linux kernel 2.6.21. Performance evaluation results show that proposed technique reduces the average major page fault handling latency by 28%.