An Overview of File System Architectures

Abstract

We provide an overview of different file system architectures. We show the influence of I/O access pattern studies results on file system design. We present techniques, algorithms and data structures used in file system implementations. We overview issues related to both local and distributed file systems. We describe distributed file system architectures for different kinds of network connectivity: tightly-connected networks (clusters and supercomputers), loosely-connected networks (computational grids) or disconnected computers (mobile computing). File system architectures for both network-attached and computer-attached storage are reviewed. We show how the parallel file systems address the requirements of I/O bound parallel applications. Different file sharing semantics in distributed and parallel file systems are explored. We also present how efficient metadata management can be realized in journaled file systems.