Streaming extensibility in the modify-on-access file system

  • Authors:

  • H. Richard Kendall;Vincent W. Freeh;Paul W. Schermerhorn;Robert J. Minerick;Peter W. Rijks

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 384 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 384 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 384 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 384 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 384 Fitzpatrick Hall, Notre Dame, IN

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper presents the Modify-on-Access (Mona) file system that provides extensibility through transformations applied to streams of data. Mona overcomes two limitations of prior extensible file systems. First, the Mona file system offers two levels of extensions (kernel and user) that share a common interface. It allows performance-critical operations to execute with modest overhead in the kernel and untrusted or more complex operations to safely execute in user space. Second, Mona enables fine-grained extensions which allow an application to customize the file system at runtime. This paper discusses the implementation of the Mona file system. Our implementation adds modest overhead of 0-3 ° (0.01-0.21 µs) to file system operations. This overhead has even less effect on net system performance for several benchmarks. Moreover, this paper describes applications that achieve 4-5 times speedup using custom transformations. This paper also describes several transformations that increase functionality. Among these are the ftp transformation that allows a user to browse a remote file as though it were local and the command transformation which invokes an arbitrary executable (even a shell script) on a data stream.