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Tutorial 9

This document discusses file system structures and allocation strategies. It asks questions about problems that could occur if a file system was mounted in multiple locations, criteria for choosing allocation strategies, advantages of dynamic allocation of internal tables, how the virtual file system layer supports multiple file systems, and calculations of disk I/O operations for different allocation strategies when blocks are added or removed from files of varying sizes.

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18 views

Tutorial 9

This document discusses file system structures and allocation strategies. It asks questions about problems that could occur if a file system was mounted in multiple locations, criteria for choosing allocation strategies, advantages of dynamic allocation of internal tables, how the virtual file system layer supports multiple file systems, and calculations of disk I/O operations for different allocation strategies when blocks are added or removed from files of varying sizes.

Uploaded by

manyagarg787
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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File Structure

1. What problems could occur if a system allowed a file system to be mounted


simultaneously at more than one location?
2. Consider a system that supports the strategies of contiguous, linked, and indexed
allocation. What criteria should be used in deciding which strategy is best utilized for a
particular file?
3. Why is it advantageous for the user for an operating system to dynamically allocate its
internal tables? What are the penalties to the operating system for doing so?
4. Explain how the VFS layer allows an operating system to support multiple types of file
systems easily.
5. Consider a file currently consisting of 100 blocks. Assume that the filecontrol block (and
the index block, in the case of indexed allocation) is already in memory. Calculate how
many disk I/O operations are required for contiguous, linked, and indexed (single-level)
allocation strategies, if, for one block, the following conditions hold. In the contiguous-
allocation case, assume that there is no room to grow at the beginning but there is room to
grow at the end. Also assume that the block information to be added is stored in memory.
a. The block is added at the beginning.
b. The block is added in the middle.
c. The block is added at the end.
d. The block is removed from the beginning.
e. The block is removed from the middle.
f. The block is removed from the end.
6. How do caches help improve performance? Why do systems not use more or larger
caches if they are so useful?
7. One problem with contiguous allocation is that the user must preallocate enough space
for each file. If the file grows to be larger than the space allocated for it, special actions
must be taken. One solution to this problem is to define a file structure consisting of an
initial contiguous area (of a specified size). If this area is filled, the operating system
automatically defines an overflow area that is linked to the initial contiguous area. If the
overflow area is filled, another overflow area is allocated. Compare this implementation
of a file with the standard contiguous and linked implementations.
8. Consider a file currently consisting of 150 blocks. Assume that the file control block (and
the index block, in the case of indexed allocation) is already in memory. Calculate how
many disk I/O operations are required for contiguous, linked, and indexed (single--level)
allocation strategies, if, for one block, the following conditions hold. In the contiguous--
allocation case, assume that there is no room to grow in the beginning, but there is room
to grow in the end. Assume that the block information to be added is stored in memory.
9. Consider a file system on a disk that has both logical and physical block sizes of 512
bytes. Assume that the information about each file is already in memory. For the
contiguous strategy, answer these questions:
a) How is the logical-to-physical address mapping accomplished in this system? (For the
indexed allocation, assume that a file is always less than 512 blocks long.)
b) If we are currently at logical block 10 (the last block accessed was block 10) and want
to access logical block 4, how many physical blocks must be read from the disk?

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