Offloading File System Clients onto a Data Processing Unit (DPU) with DPUFS

Distributed File System (DFS) is a fundamental system service on public clouds. As DFS has developed and storage disaggregation technology has been applied, DFS clients have increasingly consumed CPU resources, burdening other applications. Offloading file system clients onto a Data Processing Unit (DPU) is a promising solution. We propose DPUFS, a high-performance DPU-based file system. DPUFS offloads file system clients onto a DPU, allowing CPU and memory resources on the host to be reserved for applications. To diminish link overhead, we exploit Scalable Metadata Cache to offload metadata processing and provide scalable performance. To reduce datapath overhead, we introduce RDMA-Based Datapath, which utilizes the software features of the DPU to achieve zero-copy datapath by bypassing DPU memory. Our evaluation shows that DPUFS effectively offloads the file system clients while maximizing performance with the limited resources of the DPU. Compared with the state-of-Theart DPFS, DPUFS achieved 37 % to 61 % latency reduction in file operations and up to 3.8 × throughput in Filebench.