Adaptive Filesystem Compression for Embedded Systems

University of Michigan
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Lan S. Bai
Haris Lekatsas
Robert P. Dick


Summary

Embedded system secondary storage size is often constrained, yet storage demands are growing as a result of increasing application complexity and storage of personal data and multimedia files. Filesystem compression offers a solution. This project formalizes the problem of automatic filesystem compression using multiple compression algorithms. The average latency of on-line file accesses is optimized under a constraint on filesystem capacity. Our solution is based on predictive control. Predicted latency implications are used to solve the file compression state selection problem using a multiple choice knapsack problem formulation. This approach is evaluated on filesystem traces and compared with other efficient heuristics. Our approach results in 34.1% reduction in file access latency compared to a straight-forward heuristic that decompresses frequently-accessed files and compresses least recently used files with more aggressive compression algorithms. It reduces file access latency by 67.7% compared to uniformly compressing files to the shallowest level required to meet storage capacity constraints.

Publication

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