Lecture 8

File-System
Contents
O File Concept
O Access Methods
O Disk and Directory Structure
O File-System Mounting
O File Sharing
O Protection
Objectives
O To explain the function of file systems
O To describe the interfaces to file systems
O To discuss file-system design tradeoffs,
including access methods, file sharing,
file locking, and directory structures
O To explore file-system protection
Overview of Mass
Storage Structure
O Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary
storage of modern computers
O Drives rotate at 60 to 250 times per second
O Transfer rate is rate at which data flow between drive
and computer
O Positioning time (random-access time) is time to move
disk arm to desired cylinder (seek time) and time for desired
sector to rotate under the disk head (rotational latency)
O Head crash results from disk head making contact with the
disk surface -- That’s bad
O Disks can be removable
O Drive attached to computer via I/O bus
O Busses vary, including EIDE, ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre
Channel, SCSI, SAS, Firewire
O Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk
controller
built into drive or storage array
Solid-State Disks
O Nonvolatile memory used like a hard drive
O Many technology variations
O Can be more reliable than HDDs
O More expensive per MB
O Maybe have shorter life span
O Less capacity
O But much faster
O Busses can be too slow -> connect directly to
PCI for example
O No moving parts, so no seek time or rotational
latency
Magnetic Tape
O Was early secondary-storage medium
O Evolved from open spools to cartridges
O Relatively permanent and holds large quantities of data
O Access time slow
O Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
O Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used data,
transfer medium between systems
O Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write
head
O Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
O 140MB/sec and greater
O 200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
O Common technologies are LTO-{3,4,5} and T10000
 7

Big picture: performance gap

 8

What problem are we

solving?
OData storage & access
O Super important
O One of the fastest growing
industry
O Why?
O Driven by technology

1956, IBM, 24 inches, 3.75MB,

1KB/sec, > $150,000

2015, Seagate, 3.5 inches, 5TB,

6Gb/sec, < $200
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Disks and the

OS
O Disks are messy physical devices
O Errors, bad blocks, missed seeks, etc.
O The job of the OS is to hide this mess
from higher level software
O Low-level device control (initiate a
disk read, etc.)
O Higher-level abstractions (files, databases,
etc.)
 10

How hard disk work?

O http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdmLvl1n
82U
O https://youtu.be/9eMWG3fwiEU?t=11
O Disk components
O Platters O
Surfaces O
Tracks
O Cylinders O
Sectors O
Arm
O Heads
 11

Another View of Disk

 12

Disk Interaction
O Specifying disk requests requires a lot of info:
O Cylinder #, surface #, sector #, transfer size…
O Older disks required the OS to specify all of this
O The OS needed to know all disk parameters
O Modern disks are more complicated
O Not all sectors are the same size, sectors are
remapped, etc.
O Current disks provide a higher-level interface (SCSI)
O The disk exports its data as a logical array of
blocks [0…N]
O Disk maps logical blocks to
cylinder/surface/track/sector
O Only need to specify the logical block # to
read/write
O But now the disk parameters are hidden from
the OS
 13

Disk Performance
O Ra ndom disk access is Access data
sequentially: only suffer
SLOW!
Data
one seek and
rotational delay

delay
Seek Random disk
access: suffers
one seek and
rotational delay
every time!
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Disk Performance
O Disk request performance depends upon three steps
O Seek – moving the disk arm to the correct cylinder
O Depends on how fast disk arm can move (increasing
very slowly)
O Rotation – waiting for the sector to rotate under
the head
O Depends on rotation rate of disk (increasing, but
slowly)
O Transfer – transferring data from surface into disk
controller electronics, sending it back to the
host O Depends on density (increasing quickly)
O When the OS uses the disk, it tries to minimize the
cost of all of these steps
O Particularly seeks and rotation
 15

Disks: 2016
O Seagate Cheetah 3.5" (server)
O capacity: 300 - 600 GB
O rotational speed: 15,000 RPM
O sequential read performance: 122 MB/s - 204 MB/s
O seek time (average): 3.4 ms
O Seagate Barracuda 3.5" (desktop)
O capacity: 250 GB – 4TB
O rotational speed: 7,200 RPM
O sequential read performance: 125 MB/s - 146 MB/s
O seek time (average): 8.5 ms
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Disk Scheduling
O Because seeks are so expensive (milliseconds!),
the OS tries to schedule disk requests that are
queued waiting for the disk
O FCFS (do nothing)
O Reasonable when load is low
O Long waiting times for long request queues
O SSTF (shortest seek time first)
O Minimize arm movement (seek time), maximize
request rate
O Favors middle blocks
O SCAN (elevator)
O Service requests in one direction until done, then reverse
O C-SCAN
O Like SCAN, but only go in one direction (typewriter)
Disk Attachment
O Host-attached storage accessed through I/O
ports talking to I/O busses
O SCSI itself is a bus, up to 16 devices on one
cable, SCSI initiator requests operation and
SCSI targets perform tasks
O Each target can have up to 8 logical units
(disks attached to device controller)
O FC is high-speed serial architecture
O Can be switched fabric with 24-bit address
space – the basis of storage area networks
(SANs) in which many hosts attach to many
storage units
O I/O directed to bus ID, device ID, logical unit
(LUN)
Disk Management
O Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a
disk into sectors that the disk controller can read and write
O Each sector can hold header information, plus data, plus
error correction code (ECC)
O Usually 512 bytes of data but can be selectable
O To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to
record its own data structures on the disk
O Partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders,
each treated as a logical disk
O Logical formatting or “making a file system”
O To increase efficiency most file systems group blocks
into clusters
O Disk I/O done in blocks
O File I/O done in clusters
Disk Management (Cont.)
O Raw disk access for apps that want to do
their own block management, keep OS out
of the way (databases for example)
O Boot block initializes system
O The bootstrap is stored in ROM
O Bootstrap loader program stored in boot
blocks of boot partition
O Methods such as sector sparing
used to handle bad blocks
Booting from a Disk
in Windows
Data Structures for Swapping
on Linux Systems
RAID Structure
O RAID – redundant array of inexpensive disks
O multiple disk drives provides reliability via redundancy
O Increases the mean time to failure
O Mean time to repair – exposure time when another
failure could cause data loss
O Mean time to data loss based on above factors
O If mirrored disks fail independently, consider disk with
1300,000 mean time to failure and 10 hour mean time to
repair
O Mean time to data loss is 100, 0002 / (2 ∗ 10) = 500 ∗
106 hours, or 57,000 years!
O Frequently combined with NVRAM to improve
write performance
O Several improvements in disk-use techniques involve the use
of multiple disks working cooperatively
RAID (Cont.)
O Disk striping uses a group of disks as one storage unit
O RAID is arranged into six different levels
O RAID schemes improve performance and improve the
reliability of the storage system by storing redundant data
O Mirroring or shadowing (RAID 1) keeps duplicate of
each disk
O Striped mirrors (RAID 1+0) or mirrored stripes (RAID
0+1) provides high performance and high reliability
O Block interleaved parity (RAID 4, 5, 6) uses
much less redundancy
O RAID within a storage array can still fail if the array fails, so
automatic replication of the data between arrays is
common
O Frequently, a small number of hot-spare disks are left
unallocated, automatically replacing a failed disk and
having data rebuilt onto them
RAID Levels
RAID (0 + 1) and (1 + 0)
File Concept
O Contiguous logical address space
O Types:
O Data
O numeric
O character
O binary
O Program
O Contents
defined by
file’s creator
O Many
types
O Consider
text file,
source file,
File Attributes
O Name – only information kept in human-readable form
O Identifier – unique tag (number) identifies file within file system
O Type – needed for systems that support different types
O Location – pointer to file location on device
O Size – current file size
O Protection – controls who can do reading, writing, executing
O Time, date, and user identification – data for protection,
security, and usage monitoring
O Information about files are kept in the directory structure, which
is maintained on the disk
O Many variations, including extended file attributes such as
file checksum
O Information kept in the directory structure
File info MS Window 10
File Operations
O File is an abstract data type
O Create
O Write – at write pointer location
O Read – at read pointer
location O Reposition within file -
seek
O Delete
O Truncate
O Open(Fi) – search the directory structure on
disk for entry Fi, and move the content of
entry to memory
O Close (Fi) – move the content of entry Fi in
memory to directory structure on disk