Chapter 15: File System

Internals

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Chapter 15: File System Internals
 File Systems
 File-System Mounting
 Partitions and Mounting
 File Sharing
 Virtual File Systems
 Remote File Systems
 Consistency Semantics
 NFS

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 15.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Objectives

 Delve into the details of file systems and their

implementation
 Explore booting and file sharing
 Describe remote file systems, using NFS as an example

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 File System
 General-purpose computers can have multiple storage devices
 Devices can be sliced into partitions, which hold volumes
 Volumes can span multiple partitions
 Each volume usually formatted into a file system
 # of file systems varies, typically dozens available to choose from

Typical storage device organization:

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 15.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Example Mount Points and File Systems - Solaris

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 Partitions and Mounting
 Partition can be a volume containing a file system (“cooked”) or raw –
just a sequence of blocks with no file system
 Boot block can point to boot volume or boot loader set of blocks that
contain enough code to know how to load the kernel from the file
system
 Or a boot management program for multi-os booting
 Root partition contains the OS, other partitions can hold other Oses,
other file systems, or be raw
 Mounted at boot time
 Other partitions can mount automatically or manually on mount
points – location at which they can be accessed
 At mount time, file system consistency checked
 Is all metadata correct?
 If not, fix it, try again
 If yes, add to mount table, allow access

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 15.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 File Systems and Mounting
(a) Unix-like file
system directory
tree
(b)Unmounted file
system

After mounting (b)

into the existing
directory tree

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 File Sharing
 Allows multiple users / systems access to the same files
 Permissions / protection must be implement and accurate
 Most systems provide concepts of owner, group member
 Must have a way to apply these between systems

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 Virtual File Systems
 Virtual File Systems (VFS) on Unix provide an object-oriented
way of implementing file systems
 VFS allows the same system call interface (the API) to be used
for different types of file systems
 Separates file-system generic operations from
implementation details
 Implementation can be one of many file systems types, or
network file system
 Implements vnodes which hold inodes or network file
details
 Then dispatches operation to appropriate file system
implementation routines

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 Virtual File Systems (Cont.)
 The API is to the VFS interface, rather than any specific type of
file system

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 Virtual File System Implementation
 For example, Linux has four object types:
 inode, file, superblock, dentry
 VFS defines set of operations on the objects that must be
implemented
 Every object has a pointer to a function table
 Function table has addresses of routines to implement that
function on that object
 For example:
 • int open(. . .)—Open a file
 • int close(. . .)—Close an already-open file
 • ssize t read(. . .)—Read from a file
 • ssize t write(. . .)—Write to a file
 • int mmap(. . .)—Memory-map a file

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 15.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 Remote File Systems

 Sharing of files across a network

 First method involved manually sharing each file – programs
like ftp
 Second method uses a distributed file system (DFS)
 Remote directories visible from local machine
 Third method – World Wide Web
 A bit of a revision to first method
 Use browser to locate file/files and download /upload
 Anonymous access doesn’t require authentication

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 Client-Server Model

 Sharing between a server (providing access to a file system

via a network protocol) and a client (using the protocol to
access the remote file system)
 Identifying each other via network ID can be spoofed,
encryption can be performance expensive
 NFS an example
 User auth info on clients and servers must match
(UserIDs for example)
 Remote file system mounted, file operations sent on
behalf of user across network to server
 Server checks permissions, file handle returned
 Handle used for reads and writes until file closed

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 Distributed Information Systems

 Aka distributed naming services, provide unified access to

info needed for remote computing
 Domain name system (DNS) provides host-name-to-
network-address translations for the Internet
 Others like network information service (NIS) provide user-
name, password, userID, group information
 Microsoft’s common Internet file system (CIFS) network
info used with user auth to create network logins that server
uses to allow to deny access
 Active directory distributed naming service
 Kerberos-derived network authentication protocol
 Industry moving toward lightweight directory-access
protocol (LDAP) as secure distributed naming mechanism

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 Consistency Semantics
 Important criteria for evaluating file sharing-file systems
 Specify how multiple users are to access shared file simultaneously
 When modifications of data will be observed by other users
 Directly related to process synchronization algorithms, but atomicity across a
network has high overhead (see Andrew File System)
 The series of accesses between file open and closed called file session
 UNIX semantics
 Writes to open file immediately visible to others with file open
 One mode of sharing allows users to share pointer to current I/O location in
file
 Single physical image, accessed exclusively, contention causes process
delays
 Session semantics (Andrew file system (OpenAFS))
 Writes to open file not visible during session, only at close
 Can be several copies, each changed independently

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition 15.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018
 The Sun Network File System (NFS)

 An implementation and a specification of a software system

for accessing remote files across LANs (or WANs)

 The implementation originally part of SunOS operating

system, now industry standard / very common
 Can use unreliable datagram protocol (UDP/IP) or TCP/IP,
over Ethernet or other network

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 NFS (Cont.)
 Interconnected workstations viewed as a set of independent machines
with independent file systems, which allows sharing among these file
systems in a transparent manner
 A remote directory is mounted over a local file system directory
 The mounted directory looks like an integral subtree of the local
file system, replacing the subtree descending from the local
directory
 Specification of the remote directory for the mount operation is
nontransparent; the host name of the remote directory has to be
provided
 Files in the remote directory can then be accessed in a
transparent manner
 Subject to access-rights accreditation, potentially any file system
(or directory within a file system), can be mounted remotely on top
of any local directory

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 NFS (Cont.)

 NFS is designed to operate in a heterogeneous environment of

different machines, operating systems, and network architectures;
the NFS specifications independent of these media

 This independence is achieved through the use of RPC primitives

built on top of an External Data Representation (XDR) protocol used
between two implementation-independent interfaces

 The NFS specification distinguishes between the services provided

by a mount mechanism and the actual remote-file-access services

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 Three Independent File Systems

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 Mounting in NFS

Mounts Cascading mounts

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 NFS Mount Protocol
 Establishes initial logical connection between server and client
 Mount operation includes name of remote directory to be mounted
and name of server machine storing it
 Mount request is mapped to corresponding RPC and forwarded
to mount server running on server machine
 Export list – specifies local file systems that server exports for
mounting, along with names of machines that are permitted to
mount them
 Following a mount request that conforms to its export list, the
server returns a file handle—a key for further accesses
 File handle – a file-system identifier, and an inode number to
identify the mounted directory within the exported file system
 The mount operation changes only the user’s view and does not
affect the server side

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 NFS Protocol
 Provides a set of remote procedure calls for remote file operations.
The procedures support the following operations:
 searching for a file within a directory
 reading a set of directory entries
 manipulating links and directories
 accessing file attributes
 reading and writing files
 NFS servers are stateless; each request has to provide a full set
of arguments (NFS V4 is newer, less used – very different,
stateful)
 Modified data must be committed to the server’s disk before
results are returned to the client (lose advantages of caching)
 The NFS protocol does not provide concurrency-control
mechanisms

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 Three Major Layers of NFS Architecture

 UNIX file-system interface (based on the open, read, write, and

close calls, and file descriptors)

 Virtual File System (VFS) layer – distinguishes local files from

remote ones, and local files are further distinguished according to
their file-system types
 The VFS activates file-system-specific operations to handle
local requests according to their file-system types
 Calls the NFS protocol procedures for remote requests

 NFS service layer – bottom layer of the architecture

 Implements the NFS protocol

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 Schematic View of NFS Architecture

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 NFS Path-Name Translation

 Performed by breaking the path into component names and

performing a separate NFS lookup call for every pair of
component name and directory vnode

 To make lookup faster, a directory name lookup cache on the

client’s side holds the vnodes for remote directory names

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 NFS Remote Operations

 Nearly one-to-one correspondence between regular UNIX system

calls and the NFS protocol RPCs (except opening and closing
files)
 NFS adheres to the remote-service paradigm, but employs
buffering and caching techniques for the sake of performance
 File-blocks cache – when a file is opened, the kernel checks with
the remote server whether to fetch or revalidate the cached
attributes
 Cached file blocks are used only if the corresponding cached
attributes are up to date
 File-attribute cache – the attribute cache is updated whenever new
attributes arrive from the server
 Clients do not free delayed-write blocks until the server confirms
that the data have been written to disk

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 End of Chapter 15

Operating System Concepts – 10th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2018