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03-1 File Systems

This document discusses file systems and distributed file systems. It provides an overview of key concepts like filenames, directories, metadata and computer files. It also describes the differences between local and distributed file systems and discusses decentralized file systems like IPFS. The document outlines goals for network transparency and availability in distributed file systems. It examines common client-server and symmetric architectures and covers important design issues such as naming, file sharing semantics, caching and replication.

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Trần Tuấn Phong
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17 views9 pages

03-1 File Systems

This document discusses file systems and distributed file systems. It provides an overview of key concepts like filenames, directories, metadata and computer files. It also describes the differences between local and distributed file systems and discusses decentralized file systems like IPFS. The document outlines goals for network transparency and availability in distributed file systems. It examines common client-server and symmetric architectures and covers important design issues such as naming, file sharing semantics, caching and replication.

Uploaded by

Trần Tuấn Phong
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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24/10/2022

File systems
Instructor: Dr. Thanh-Chung Dao
Slides by Dr. Viet-Trung Tran
School of Information and Communication Technology

File systems

NTFS

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Overview
• Filenames
• File Identity
• Directories (folders)
• Group of files in separate collections
• Metadata
• Creation time, last access time, last modification time
• Security information (Owner, Group owner)
• Mapping file to its physical location of file (e.g. location in storage devices)
• Computer file
• A resource for storing information
• Durable, remained available for access
• Data: sequences of bits
• File system
• Control how computer file are stored and retrieved
• Main operators: READ, WRITE (offset, size), CREATE, DELETE

Local vs. distributed file systems


Local file systems

NTFS

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Distributed file system

• File system
• Abstraction of storage devices
• Distributed file system
• Available to remote processes in distributed systems
• Benefits
• File sharing
• Uniform view of system from different clients
• Centralized administration

Decentralized file system

• IPFS
• WebTorrent

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24/10/2022

Goals: Network (Access) Transparency

• Network (Access) Transparency


• Users should be able to access files over a network as easily as if the files
were stored locally.
• Users should not have to know the physical location of a file to access it.
• Transparency can be addressed through naming and file mounting
mechanisms
• Location Transparency: file name doesn’t specify physical location
• Location Independence: files can be moved to new physical location, no need
to change references to them. (A name is independent of its addresses)
• Location independence → location transparency, but the reverse is not
necessarily true.

Goals: Availability

• Availability: files should be easily and quickly accessible.


• The number of users, system failures, or other consequences of
distribution shouldn’t compromise the availability.
• Addressed mainly through replication.

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Architectures

• Client-Server
• Sun Microsystem Network File System (NFS), Google File System (GFS)
• Architecture
• One or more machines (file servers) manage the file system.
• Files are stored on disks at the servers
• Requests for file operations are made from clients to the servers.
• Client-server systems centralize storage and management; P2P systems
decentralize it.
• Symmetric
• Fully decentralized; based on peer-to-peer technology
• e.g., Ivy (uses a Chord DHT approach)
• E.g. IPFS and webtorrent

Design issues in distributed file


systems

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Design issues

• Naming and name resolution


• Semantics of file sharing
• Caching
• Replication

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Naming and name resolution

• A name space -- collection of names


• Name resolution -- mapping a name to an object
• 3 traditional ways
• Concatenate the host name to the names of files stored on that host
• Mount remote directories onto local directories
• Provide a single global directory

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File Sharing Semantics (1/2)

• Problem: When dealing with distributed file


systems, we need to take into account the
ordering of concurrent read/write operations,
and expected semantics (=consistency).

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File Sharing Semantics (2/2)

• Assume open; reads/writes; close


• UNIX semantics: value read is the value stored by last write
Writes to an open file are visible immediately to others that have this file
opened at the same time. Easy to implement if one server and no cache.
• Session semantics:
Writes to an open file by a user is not visible immediately by other users that
have files opened already.
Once a file is closed, the changes made by it are visible by sessions started
later.
• Immutable-Shared-Files semantics:
A sharable file cannot be modified.
File names cannot be reused and its contents may not be altered.
Simple to implement.
• Transactions: All changes have all-or-nothing property. W1,R1,R2,W2 not
allowed where P1 = W1;W2 and P2 = R1;R2

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Caching

• Server caching: in main memory


• cache management issue, how much to cache, replacement strategy
• still slow due to network delay
• Used in high-performance web-search engine servers
• Client caching in main memory
• can be used by diskless workstation
• faster to access from main memory than disk
• compete with the virtual memory system for physical memory space
• Client-cache on a local disk
• large files can be cached
• the virtual memory management is simpler
• a workstation can function even when it is disconnected from the network

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Caching tradeoffs

• Reduces remote accesses => reduces network traffic and server


load
• Total network overhead is lower for big chunks of data (caching)
than a series of responses to specific requests.
• Disk access can be optimized better for large requests than random
disk blocks
• Cache-consistency problem is the major drawback. If there are
frequent writes, overhead due to the consistency problem is
significant.

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Replication

• File data is replicated to multiple storage servers


• Goals
• Increase reliability
• improve availability
• balance the servers workload
• How to make replication transparent?
• How to keep the replicas consistent?
• a replica is not updated due to its server failure
• network partitioned

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