Abstract
File system virtual appliances (FSVAs) address the portability headaches that plague file system (FS) developers. By packaging their FS implementation in a virtual machine (VM), separate from the VM that runs user applications, they can avoid the need to port the file system to each operating system (OS) and OS version. A small FS-agnostic proxy, maintained by the core OS developers, connects the FSVA to whatever OS the user chooses. This article describes an FSVA design that maintains FS semantics for unmodified FS implementations and provides desired OS and virtualization features, such as a unified buffer cache and VM migration. Evaluation of prototype FSVA implementations in Linux and NetBSD, using Xen as the virtual machine manager (VMM), demonstrates that the FSVA architecture is efficient, FS-agnostic, and able to insulate file system implementations from OS differences that would otherwise require explicit porting.
- Abd-El-Malek, M., Wachs, M., Cipar, J., Sanghi, K., Ganger, G. R., Gibson, G. A., and Reiter, M. K. 2009. File system virtual appliances: Portable file system implementations. Tech. rep., Parallel Data Lab, Carnegie Mellon University.Google Scholar
- Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K. , Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., and Warfield, A. 2003. Xen and the art of virtualization. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. 164--177. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Bershad, B. N. and Pinkerton, C. B. 1988. Watchdogs: Extending the UNIX File System. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 267--275.Google Scholar
- Borden, T. L., Hennessy, J. P., and Rymarczyk, J. W. 1989. Multiple operating systems on one processor complex. IBM Syst. J. 28, 1, 104--123. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Burtsev, A., Srinivasan, K., Radhakrishnan, P., Bairavasundaram, L. N., Voruganti, K., and Goodson, G. R. 2009. Fido: Fast inter-virtual-machine communication for enterprise appliances. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Callaghan, B. and Lyon, T. 1989. The automounter. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 43--51.Google Scholar
- Carns, P. H., Ligon III, W. B., Ross, R. B., and Thakur, R. 2000. PVFS: A parallel file system for Linux clusters. In Proceedings of the Annual Linux Showcase and Conference. 317--327. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Clark, C., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Hansen, J. G., Jul, E., Limpach, C., Pratt, I., and Warfield, A. 2005. Live migration of virtual machines. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 273--286. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Clements, P. and Northrop, L. 2001. Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Ebling, M., Mummert, L., and Steere, D. 1994. Overcoming the network bottleneck in mobile computing. In Proceedings of the IEEE 1st Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA). Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Eifeldt, H. 1997. POSIX: A developer's view of standards. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 24--24. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Eisler, M., Corbet, P., Kazar, M., Nydick, D. S., and Wagner, C. 2007. Data ONTAP GX: A scalable storage cluster. In Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. 23--23. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Fraser, K., Hand, S., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A., and Williams On, M. 2004. Reconstructing I/O. Tech. rep., Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
- FUSE. FUSE: Filesystem In userspace. http://fuse.sourceforge.net.Google Scholar
- Gingell, R. A., Moran, J. P., and Shannon, W. A. 1987. Virtual memory architecture in SunOS. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 81--94.Google Scholar
- Gupta, D., Cherkasova, L., Gardner, R., and Vahdat, A. 2006. Enforcing performance isolation across virtual machines in Xen. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference On Middleware. 342--362. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Kantee, A. 2009. Rump file systems: Kernel code reborn. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Katcher, J. 1997. PostMark: A new file system benchmark. Tech. rep., Network Appliance, Inc.Google Scholar
- Kleiman, S. R. 1986. Vnodes: An architecture for multiple file system types in Sun Unix. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 238--247.Google Scholar
- LeVasseur, J., Uhlig, V., Stoess, J., and Gotz, S. 2004. Unmodified device driver reuse and improved system dependability via virtual machines. In Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Mazieres, D. 2001. A toolkit for user-level file systems. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Meyer, D. T., Aggarwal, G., Cully, B., Lefebvre, G., Feeley, M. J., Hutchinson, N. C., and Warfiel D, A. 2008. Parallax: virtual disks for virtual machines. In Proceedings of the SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (Euro-Sys). 41--54. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Padioleau, Y., Lawall, J., Hansen, R. R., and Muller, G. 2008. Documenting and automating collateral evolutions in Linux device drivers. In Proceedings of the SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (Euro-Sys). 247--260. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Patterson, R. H., Gibson, G. A., Ginting, E., Stodolsky, D., and Zelenka, J. 1995. Informed prefetching and caching. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. 79--95. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Pfaff, B. 2007. Improving virtual hardware interfaces. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Pfaff, B., Garfinkel, T., and Rosenblum, M. 2006. Virtualization aware file systems: Getting beyond the limitations of virtual disks. In Proceedings of the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 353--366. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Redhat. 2004. Bug 111656: In 2.4.20.-20.7 memory module, rebalance laundry zone() does not respect gfp mask GFP - NOFS. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=111656.Google Scholar
- Rosenblum, M. 2004. The reincarnation of virtual machines. Queue 2, 5, 34--40. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Rosenblum, M. and Ousterhout, J. K. 1992. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. Trans. Comput. Syst. 10, 1, 26--52. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Sapuntzakis, C. and Lam, M. S. 2003. Virtual appliances in the collective: A road to hassle-free computing. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS). 55--60. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Schmuck, F. and Haskin, R. 2002. GPFS: A shared-disk file system for large computing clusters. InProceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. 19. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Silvers, C. 2000. UBC: An efficient unified I/O and memory caching subsystem for NetBSD. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 54--54. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Smith, J. E. and Nair, R. 2005. The architecture of virtual machines. Comput. 38, 5, 32--38. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Thekkath, C. A., Wilkes, J., and Lazowska, E. D. 1994. Techniques for file system simulation. Softw. Pract. Exper. 24, 11, 981--999. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Waldspurger, C. 2002. Memory resource management in VMware ESX server. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation. 181--194. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Warfield, A., Hand, S., Fraser, K., and Deegan, T. 2005. Facilitating the development of soft devices. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 22--22. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Watson, A., Benn, P., and Yoder, A. G. 2001. Multiprotocol data access: NFS, CIFS, and HTTP. Tech. rep., Network Appliance, Inc.Google Scholar
- Webber, N. 1993. Operating system support for portable filesystem extensions. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 219--228.Google Scholar
- Weinhold, C. and Härtig, H. 2008. VPFS: Building a virtual private file system with a small trusted computing base. In Proceedings of the SIGOPS European Conference on Computer Systems (Euro-Sys). 81--93. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Welch, B., Unangst, M., Abbasi, Z., Gibson, G., Mueller, B., Small, J., Zelenka, J., and Zhou, B. 2008. Scalable performance of the Panasas parallel file system. In Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. 1--17. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Williamson, M. 2009. XenFS. http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenFS.Google Scholar
- Yang, J., Sar, C., Twohey, P., Cadar, C., and Engler, D. 2006. Automatically generating malicious disks using symbolic execution. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 243--257. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Zadok, E. and Nieh, J. 2000. FiST: A language for stackable file systems. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 55--70. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Zhao, X., Prakash, A., Noble, B., and Borders, K. 2006. Improving distributed file system performance in virtual machine environments. Tech. rep., University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Index Terms
File system virtual appliances: Portable file system implementations
Recommendations
Live gang migration of virtual machines
HPDC '11: Proceedings of the 20th international symposium on High performance distributed computingThis paper addresses the problem of simultaneously migrating a group of co-located and live virtual machines (VMs), i.e, VMs executing on the same physical machine. We refer to such a mass simultaneous migration of active VMs as "live gang migration". ...
Virtio network paravirtualization driver
One of the techniques used to improve I/O performance of virtual machines is paravirtualization. Paravirtualized devices are intended to reduce the performance overhead on full virtualization where all hardware devices are emulated. The interface of a ...






Comments