File System Virtual Appliances: Portable File System Implementations

Abstract

File system virtual appliances (FSVAs) address the portability headaches that plague file system (FS) developers. By packaging their FS implementation in a VM, separate from the VM that runs user applications, they can avoid the need to port the file system to each 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 paper 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 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.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA522537

Entities

People

  • Garth A. Gibson
  • Gregory R. Ganger
  • James Cipar
  • Karen Sanghi
  • Matthew Wachs
  • Michael Abd-el-malek
  • Michael Reiter

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Case Studies
  • Computer Access Control
  • Computer Program Reliability
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Debugging
  • Device Drivers
  • Hypervisors
  • Kernels (Operating System)
  • Language
  • Migration
  • Operating Systems
  • Prototypes
  • Semantics
  • Software Development
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Virtualization

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics
  • Microelectronics - Microelectromechanical Systems