The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System (1991)
Weekly Paper Notes — 🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week, 2026-08-01. Area: Operating Systems / Storage. Authors: Mendel Rosenblum, John K. Ousterhout (University of California, Berkeley) Published: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 1992 (SOSP ‘91) DOI: 10.1145/146941.146943 Why this paper still matters Almost every high-performance storage system built in the last fifteen years is a log-structured file system wearing a different name. LevelDB, RocksDB, Cassandra, HBase, Kafka, every SSD’s flash translation layer, ZFS’s copy-on-write, btrfs, WiredTiger, Lucene’s segment merges — all of them convert random writes into sequential appends and then run a background process to reclaim space....