Chapter 11:

File-System Interface

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Chapter 11: File-System Interface

 File Concept
 Access Methods
 Disk and Directory Structure
 File-System Mounting
 File Sharing
 Protection

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

1
 Objectives

 To explain the function of file systems

 To describe the interfaces to file systems
 To discuss file-system design tradeoffs, including access
methods, file sharing, file locking, and directory structures
 To explore file-system protection

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

File Concept
 Contiguous logical address space
 Types:
 Data
 numeric

 character

 binary

 Program
 Contents defined by file’s creator
 Many types
 Consider text file, source file, executable file

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

2
 File Attributes
 Name – only information kept in human-readable form
 Identifier – unique tag (number) identifies file within file system
 Type – needed for systems that support different types
 Location – pointer to file location on device
 Size – current file size
 Protection – controls who can do reading, writing, executing
 Time, date, and user identification – data for protection,
security, and usage monitoring
 Information about files are kept in the directory structure, which
is maintained on the disk
 Many variations, including extended file attributes such as file
checksum
 Information kept in the directory structure

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

File info Window on Mac OS X

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

3
 File Operations
 File is an abstract data type
 Create
 Write – at write pointer location
 Read – at read pointer location
 Reposition within file - seek
 Delete
 Truncate
 Open(Fi) – search the directory structure on disk for entry Fi,
and move the content of entry to memory
 Close (Fi) – move the content of entry Fi in memory to directory
structure on disk

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Open Files

 Several pieces of data are needed to manage open files:

 Open-file table: tracks open files
 File pointer: pointer to last read/write location, per
process that has the file open
 File-open count: counter of number of times a file is
open – to allow removal of data from open-file table
when last processes closes it
 Disk location of the file: cache of data access
information
 Access rights: per-process access mode information

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

4
 Open File Locking
 Provided by some operating systems and file systems
 Similar to reader-writer locks
 Shared lock similar to reader lock – several processes can
acquire concurrently
 Exclusive lock similar to writer lock
 Mediates access to a file
 Mandatory or advisory:
 Mandatory – access is denied depending on locks held and
requested
 Advisory – processes can find status of locks and decide
what to do

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

File Types – Name, Extension

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

5
 File Structure
 None - sequence of words, bytes
 Simple record structure
Lines

Fixed length

 Variable length
 Complex Structures
 Formatted document
 Relocatable load file
 Can simulate last two with first method by inserting appropriate
control characters
 Who decides:
 Operating system
 Program

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Access Methods
 Sequential Access
read next
write next
reset (to the beginning)

 Direct Access – file is fixed length logical records

read n
write n
position to n
read next
write next
rewrite n
n = relative block number

 Relative block numbers allow OS to decide where file should be placed

 See allocation problem in Ch 12

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

6
 Sequential-access File

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Other Access Methods

 Can be built on top of base methods

 General involve creation of an index for the file
 Keep index in memory for fast determination of location of data
to be operated on (consider UPC code plus record of data
about that item)
 If too large, index (in memory) of the index (on disk)
 IBM indexed sequential-access method (ISAM)
 Small master index, points to disk blocks of secondary
index
 File kept sorted on a defined key
 All done by the OS
 VMS operating system provides index and relative files as
another example (see next slide)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

7
 Example of Index and Relative Files

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Disk Structure

 Disk can be subdivided into partitions

 Disks or partitions can be RAID protected against failure
 Disk or partition can be used raw – without a file system,
or formatted with a file system
 Partitions also known as minidisks, slices
 Entity containing file system known as a volume
 Each volume containing file system also tracks that file
system’s info in device directory or volume table of
contents
 As well as general-purpose file systems there are many
special-purpose file systems, frequently all within the
same operating system or computer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

8
 A Typical File-system Organization

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Types of File Systems

 We mostly talk of general-purpose file systems
 But systems frequently have many file systems, some general- and
some special- purpose
 Consider Solaris has
 tmpfs – memory-based volatile FS for fast, temporary I/O
 objfs – interface into kernel memory to get kernel symbols for
debugging
 ctfs – contract file system for managing daemons
 lofs – loopback file system allows one FS to be accessed in
place of another
 procfs – kernel interface to process structures
 ufs, zfs – general purpose file systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

9
 Directory Structure

 A collection of nodes containing information about all files

Directory

Files
F1 F2 F4
F3
Fn

Both the directory structure and the files reside on disk

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Directory Organization

The directory is organized logically to obtain

 Efficiency – locating a file quickly
 Naming – convenient to users
 Two users can have same name for different files
 The same file can have several different names
 Grouping – logical grouping of files by properties, (e.g.,
all Java programs, all games, …)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

10
 Operations Performed on Directory

 Search for a file

 Create a file
 Delete a file
 List a directory
 Rename a file
 Traverse the file system

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Single-Level Directory
 A single directory for all users

 Naming problem

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

11
 Two-Level Directory
 Separate directory for each user

 Path name
 Can have the same file name for different user
 Efficient searching
 No grouping capability

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Tree-Structured Directories

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

12
 Tree-Structured Directories (Cont.)
 Efficient searching

 Grouping Capability (subdirectory)

 Current directory (working directory)

 cd /spell/mail/prog
 type list

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Tree-Structured Directories (Cont)

 Absolute or relative path name
 Creating a new file is done in current directory
 Delete a file
rm <file-name>
 Creating a new subdirectory is done in current directory
mkdir <dir-name>
Example: if in current directory /mail
mkdir count

Deleting “mail”  deleting the entire subtree rooted by “mail”

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

13
 Acyclic-Graph Directories
 Have shared subdirectories and files

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Acyclic-Graph Directories (Cont.)

 Two different names (aliasing)

 If dict deletes list  dangling pointer
Solutions:
 Backpointers, so we can delete all pointers
 Leave the links until an attempt is made to use them => treated
as illegal file name (same name new file?)
 Entry-hold-count solution (file-reference list) => a file is delteted
when its file-reference list is empty
 New directory entry type
 Link – another name (pointer) to an existing file
 Resolve the link – follow pointer to locate the file

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

14
 General Graph Directory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

General Graph Directory (Cont.)

 How do we guarantee no cycles?
 Allow only links to file not subdirectories
 Garbage collection
 Every time a new link is added use a cycle detection
algorithm to determine whether it is OK

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

15
 File System Mounting

 A file system must be mounted before it can be accessed

 A unmounted file system (i.e., Fig. 11-11(b)) is mounted at a
mount point

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Mount Point

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

16
 File Sharing
 Sharing of files on multi-user systems is desirable
 Sharing may be done through a protection scheme
 On distributed systems, files may be shared across a network
 Network File System (NFS) is a common distributed file-sharing
method
 If multi-user system
 User IDs identify users, allowing permissions and
protections to be per-user
Group IDs allow users to be in groups, permitting group
access rights
 Owner of a file / directory
 Group of a file / directory

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

File Sharing – Remote File Systems

 Uses networking to allow file system access between systems
 Manually via programs like FTP
 Automatically, seamlessly using distributed file systems
 Semi automatically via the world wide web
 Client-server model allows clients to mount remote file systems from
servers
 Server can serve multiple clients
 Client and user-on-client identification is insecure or complicated
 NFS is standard UNIX client-server file sharing protocol
 CIFS is standard Windows protocol
 Standard operating system file calls are translated into remote calls
 Distributed Information Systems (distributed naming services) such
as LDAP, DNS, NIS, Active Directory implement unified access to
information needed for remote computing

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

17
 File Sharing – Failure Modes

 All file systems have failure modes

 For example corruption of directory structures or other non-
user data, called metadata
 Remote file systems add new failure modes, due to network
failure, server failure
 Recovery from failure can involve state information about
status of each remote request => allow delaying of file-system
operations to remote hosts
 Stateless protocols such as NFS v3 include all information in
each request, allowing easy recovery but less security =>
forged read or write requests

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

File Sharing – Consistency Semantics

 Specify how multiple users are to access a shared file
simultaneously
 Similar to process synchronization algorithms
 Tend to be less complex due to disk I/O and network
latency (for remote file systems
 Andrew File System (AFS) implemented complex remote file
sharing semantics
 Unix file system (UFS) implements:
 Writes to an open file visible immediately to other users of
the same open file
 Sharing file pointer to allow multiple users to read and write
concurrently
 AFS has session semantics
 Writes only visible to sessions starting after the file is
closed

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

18
 Protection
 File owner/creator should be able to control:
 what can be done
 by whom
 Types of access
 Read
 Write
 Execute
 Append
 Delete
 List

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

Access Lists and Groups

 Mode of access: read, write, execute
 Three classes of users on Unix / Linux
RWX
a) owner access 7  111
RWX
b) group access 6  110
RWX
c) public access 1  001
 Ask manager to create a group (unique name), say G, and add
some users to the group.
 For a particular file (say game) or subdirectory, define an
appropriate access.

Attach a group to a file

chgrp G game

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

19
 Windows 7 Access-Control List Management

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.39 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

A Sample UNIX Directory Listing

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 11.40 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

20
 End of Chapter 11

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013

21