Log files: an extended file service exploiting write-once storage

  • Authors:
  • R. Finlayson;D. Cheriton

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA;Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • SOSP '87 Proceedings of the eleventh ACM Symposium on Operating systems principles
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

A log service provides efficient storage and retrieval of data that is written sequentially (append-only) and not subsequently modified. Application programs and subsystems use log services for recovery, to record security audit trails, and for performance monitoring. Ideally, a log service should accommodate very large, long-lived logs, and provide efficient retrieval and low space overhead.In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the Clio log service. Clio provides the abstraction of log files: readable, append-only files that are accessed in the same way as conventional files. The underlying storage medium is required only to be append-only; more general types of write access are not necessary. We show how log files can be implemented efficiently and robustly on top of such storage media—in particular, write-once optical disk.In addition, we describe a general application software storage architecture that makes use of log files.This work was supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contracts N00039-84-C-0211 and N00039-86-K-0431, by National Science Foundation grant DCR-83-52048, and by Digital Equipment Corporation, Bell-Northern Research and AT&T Information Systems.