Concepts inPipesFS: fast Linux I/O in the unix tradition
Unix
Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix) is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. The Unix operating system was first developed in assembly language, but by 1973 had been almost entirely recoded in C, greatly facilitating its further development and porting to other hardware.
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Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system (such as a computer), and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it. The term can also be used as part of an action; to "perform I/O" is to perform an input or output operation.
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Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of Linux is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released 5 October 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux was originally developed as a free operating system for Intel x86-based personal computers. It has since been ported to more computer hardware platforms than any other operating system.
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Pipeline (Unix)
In Unix-like computer operating systems (and, to some extent, Microsoft Windows), a pipeline is the original software pipeline: a set of processes chained by their standard streams, so that the output of each process feeds directly as input to the next one. Each connection is implemented by an anonymous pipe. Filter programs are often used in this configuration. The concept was invented by Douglas McIlroy for Unix shells and it was named by analogy to a physical pipeline.
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Virtual file system
A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS can, for example, be used to access local and network storage devices transparently without the client application noticing the difference.
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Grep
grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression. Grep was originally developed for the Unix operating system, but is available today for all Unix-like systems. Its name comes from the ed command g/re/p (global / regular expression / print).
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Shell script
A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. The shell is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text. Many shell script interpreters double as command line interface, such as the various Unix shells, Windows PowerShell or the MS-DOS . Others, such as AppleScript or the graphical Windows Script Host (WScript.
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Context switch
A context switch is the computing process of storing and restoring the state of a CPU so that execution can be resumed from the same point at a later time. This enables multiple processes to share a single CPU. The context switch is an essential feature of a multitasking operating system. Context switches are usually computationally intensive and much of the design of operating systems is to optimize the use of context switches.
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