It’s been almost a year since I posted anything substantive. It is so easy to just focus on other things, which is what I’ve been doing. In the past year I’ve continued to explore some interesting areas related to file systems. For example, for the past year I’ve been looking at persistent memory, which acts somewhat like storage (because it is persistent) and somewhat like DRAM (because it is byte addressed). The findings have been interesting: surprising in some cases, close to predicted in some cases. We’re still doing more work in this area, and I’m hoping to submit two papers later this year.
But the other big project is a file systems project. I’ve decided to use Windows as my platform of choice, both because I’m quite comfortable with Windows and because I think it’s the best choice for this project. Since it has been a goal of mine to do more writing in this area, I thought it would be great to use my blog to capture how I go about writing this file system for Windows with the (probably unrealistic) hope that I can eventually turn it into an online guide. I also plan on using a public repository for my project so that other people can see what I end up doing. I think I’ll turn that into a separate blog post, so I can talk more about that project.
Hopefully, by using this as a mechanism for describing my forward progress I can continue to post new information and content. That’s the theory at least.
If you are interested in persistent memory, two good recent papers are:
Basic Performance Measurements of the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory Module
Single Machine Graph Analytics on Massive Datasets Using Intel® OptaneTM DC Persistent Memory
Always looking forward to new posts from you and this series sounds great!