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A fast file system for UNIX

Published: 01 August 1984 Publication History
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References

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  1. A fast file system for UNIX

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                            Rahul Dhesi

                            The original design of the UNIX file system proved to be too slow for many applications when used on the VAX. An earlier Berkeley implementation made some improvements but was still inefficient, using only about 4 percent of the potential speed of the disk drives. Further extensive changes made to the file system and implemented in the 4.2 Berkeley Software Distribution are described in this paper. A gain in speed has been achieved by increasing the block size to a user-defined multiple of 4096 bytes. Wastage of disk space due to partially-used blocks is minimized by further breaking up each block into a user-specified number of smaller fragments. As a file grows, space is allocated in units of either fragments or blocks, depending upon the size of each write request. Extensive seek optimization is attempted when allocating a new block. Further, the organization of information about each file, stored in a special block called an inode, has been modified to decrease the number of disk accesses made when multiple files are accessed in the same directory. The result is file access times up to ten times faster than the traditional implementation, approaching 30-50 percent of the potential device speed. The paper also briefly describes other functional enhancements that were made. Filenames can now be of nearly abitrary length. Symbolic links have been added; each symbolic link is a directory entry that points to an arbitrary file that may be on any device, or on a remote machine. Access to files through symbolic links is transparent to user programs. A disk quota mechanism allows both long-term (soft) and short-term (hard) disk quotas. Finally, file-locking is available to programs that explicitly request it.

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                            cover image ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
                            ACM Transactions on Computer Systems  Volume 2, Issue 3
                            Aug. 1984
                            93 pages
                            ISSN:0734-2071
                            EISSN:1557-7333
                            DOI:10.1145/989
                            Issue’s Table of Contents
                            Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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                            Publication History

                            Published: 01 August 1984
                            Published in TOCS Volume 2, Issue 3

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                            Author Tags

                            1. UNIX
                            2. application program interface
                            3. file system design
                            4. file system organization
                            5. file system performance

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                            Cited By

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                            • (2023)LUNAR: A Native Table Engine for Embedded DevicesProceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems10.1145/3589610.3596276(122-133)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2023
                            • (2023)Oasis: Controlling Data Migration in Expansion of Object-based Storage SystemsACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/356842419:1(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2023
                            • (2022)The Relevance of Classic Fuzz Testing: Have We Solved This One?IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2020.304776648:6(2028-2039)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2022
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                            • (2022)EDC: An Elastic Data Cache to Optimizing the I/O Performance in Deduplicated SSDsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2021.310140441:7(2250-2262)Online publication date: Jul-2022
                            • (2022)bhyve - checkpoint functionality based on zfs2022 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP)10.1109/ICCP56966.2022.10053970(259-262)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2022
                            • (2022)BibliographyStorage Systems10.1016/B978-0-32-390796-5.00023-1(641-693)Online publication date: 2022
                            • (2022)Disk drive data placement and schedulingStorage Systems10.1016/B978-0-32-390796-5.00012-7(197-222)Online publication date: 2022
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