Fine-grained and concurrent access to a virtualized disk in a distributed system

摘要

A method for updating a block on disk is provided. The method involves one or more clients committing log records to queues corresponding to blocks. The method further involves checkpointing, which includes obtaining a flushing lock on the queue by a client, receiving log records from the queue, applying the log records to a block on disk, and deleting the log records from the queue. A block on disk may be updated by first applying the log records from a queue to a locally cached version of the block corresponding to the queue. The locally cached version may then be stored on the disk replacing the original block on disk or being stored as a new version of the original block.