Design and implementation of a configurable mixed-media file system

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a configurable mixed-media file system. The attribute configurable means that a file system serving a specific application area can be realized out of a library of reusable file system classes. The attribute mixed-media stands for the file system's ability to integrate different media types (RAM, harddisks, WORM optical disks, CDROMs, tape devices, RAIDs etc.) into a virtual storage, and making applications unaware of this aggregation. A prototype C++ implementation of the proposed design, called the V ANILLA file system, is presented and its performance assessed. Raw-write performance is up to 4.5 times higher than in a standard Sun OS file system. We will also demonstrate how various storage organization forms, especially hierarchies, arrays, and mirrors of both local and remote storages, can be realized using the proposed file system class library.