FalconFS1 is a file system developed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Huawei specifically to support training ADAS models. Its key innovation is pushing path name resolution entirely to the server via a custom kernel client, allowing it to handle the small-file workloads of ADAS much more efficiently than Ceph and Lustre. In doing this, it resembles object stores, but it does not take the rename penalty inherent in emulating a hierarchical namespace using flat keys.

Metadata servers rely on PostgreSQL databases, and there is a deterministic map of filename hashes to metadata servers used to distribute metadata. It also supports redirections to improve load balancing in extreme cases.

Metadata servers also maintain lazy replicas of parts of the namespace to improve hit rates and maintains coherence using cache invalidations instead of locking. Directory creations are synchronized on read to avoid high overheads of creating directories.

Footnotes

  1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10367