Faster FUSE Filesystems with Efficient Data Transfers

Systems services running at user level provide several benefits including execution isolation, flexible software development and fast device access. The FUSE framework adds backward compatibility to user-level filesystems but at a performance cost. We claim that although the FUSE data path plays critical role in the system performance, it remains relatively unexplored. We introduce several new methods to avoid memory management overheads, skip unnecessary buffering and improve memory copy efficiency. We have developed prototype software and used production local and network filesystems that experimentally show performance improvements up to 50% over the default Linux mechanism of data transfer between the application and the filesystem.