Generating Realistic Impressions for File-System Benchmarking

The performance of file systems and related software depends on characteristics of the underlying file-system image (i.e., File-system metadata and file contents). Unfortunately, rather than benchmarking with realistic file-system images, most system designers and evaluators rely on ad hoc assumptions and (Often inaccurate) rules of thumb. Furthermore, the lack of standardization and reproducibility makes file-system benchmarking ineffective. To remedy these problems, the authors develop Impressions, a framework to generate statistically accurate file-system images with realistic metadata and content. Impressions is flexible, supporting user-specified constraints on various file-system parameters using a number of statistical techniques to generate consistent images.