File System Implementation

1. File System Implementation

2. What to Learn? • File-System Structure • File-System Implementation • Directory Implementation • Allocation Methods of Disk Space • Free-Space Management • Contiguous or block-oriented • Recovery from failure • Remote file access: NFS

3. Layered File System

4. File-System Implementation • Boot control blockcontains info needed by system to boot OS from that volume • Volume control blockcontains volume details • Directory structure organizes the files • Per-file File Control Block (FCB) contains many details about the file

5. A Typical File Control Block

6. In-Memory File System Structures

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

8. Schematic View of Virtual File System

9. Directory Implementation • Linear list of file names with pointer to the data blocks. • simple to program • time-consuming to execute • Hash Table – linear list with hash data structure. • decreases directory search time • collisions– situations where two file names hash to the same location

10. Allocation of Disk Blocks • An allocation method refers to how disk blocks are allocated for files: • Contiguous allocation • Linked allocation • Indexed allocation

11. Contiguous Allocation of Disk Space

12. Contiguous Allocation • Each file occupies a set of contiguous blocks on the disk • Advantages: • Simple – only starting location (block #) and length (number of blocks) are required • Fast Random access • Disadvantages: • Not easy to grow files. • Waste in space (e.g. external fragmentation)

13. pointer block = Linked Allocation • Each file is a linked list of disk blocks: blocks may be scattered anywhere on the disk.

14. MS-DOS: File-Allocation Table

15. Linked Allocation (Cont.) • Advantages • Simple – need only starting address • Free-space management system – no waste of space • Disadvantages: • No random access • Logical address mapping Q-th block LA/511 R - offset Block to be accessed is the Qth block in the linked chain of blocks representing the file. Displacement into block = R + 1

16. One-level Indexed Allocation • Brings all pointers together into the index block • Logical view index table

17. Example of One-level Indexed Allocation

18. One-level Indexed Allocation (Cont.) • Advantages • Support random access • No external fragmentation. • Disadvantages: • Space overhead: need 1 block for index table • Maximum file size? • Assume each block is 4KB • index block holds 1024 entries (4B/entry) • 1024x block size = 4MB

19. Two-level Indexed Allocation  outer-index Indirect pointers index table: Direct pointers File data Maximum size ? 4GB

20. Combined Scheme: UNIX UFS (4K bytes per block)

21. Free-Space Management • Bit vector (n blocks) 0 1 2 n-1 … 0  block[i] free 1  block[i] occupied bit[i] =  Block number calculation (number of bits per word) * (number of 0-value words) + offset of first 1 bit

22. Free-Space Management (Cont.) • Bit map requires extra space • Example: block size = 212 bytes disk size = 230 bytes (1 gigabyte) n = 230/212 = 218 bits (or 32K bytes) • Linked list (free list) • Advantages: • Do not need contiguous space • No waste of space

23. Performance Optimization • Disk cache – separate section of main memory for frequently used blocks • Read-ahead (prefetching)– techniques to optimize sequential access • improve PC performance by dedicating section of memory as virtual disk, or RAM disk

24. Recovery • Consistency checking– compares data in directory structure with data blocks on disk, and tries to fix inconsistencies • Use system programs to back updata from disk to another storage device • Recover lost file or disk by restoringdata from backup

25. Log Structured File Systems • Log structuredfile systems record each update to the file system as a transaction • All transactions are written to a log • A transaction is considered committed once it is written to the log • However, the file system may not yet be updated • The transactions in the log are asynchronously written to the file system • When the file system is modified, the transaction is removed from the log • If the file system crashes, all remaining transactions in the log must still be performed

26. Sun Network File System (NFS) • Transparent shared file access among independent machines and file systems • A remote directory is mounted over a local file system directory • The mounted directory looks like an integral subtree of the local file system

27. Schematic View of NFS Architecture

28. NFS Protocol • Provides a set of remote procedure calls (RPC) for remote file 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 • Modified data must be committed to the server’s disk before results are returned to the client • Support data exchange format conversion using an External Data Representation (XDR) protocol