Unix file access and caching in a multicomputer environment

  • Authors:
  • Paul J. Roy

  • Affiliations:
  • OSF Research Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  • Venue:
  • MSYM'93 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX MACH III Symposium - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

This paper describes the Unix file access and caching mechanisms in a version of the OSF/1 Unix operating system designed to run in a multicomputer environment. The multicomputer hard-ware platforms targeted can consist of hundreds or even thousands of individual nodes, where each node consists of one or more processors. The multicomputer version of OSF/1 (called OSF/1 AD) uses Mach memory objects to cache data from Unix files, and relies on an in-kernel distributed shared memory implementation to maintain coherency for data cached across multiple nodes. The focus of this paper is on the modifications made to standard OSF/1 functionality to support distributed, efficient access to memory objects. Of particular interest are the introduction of a mapped files module for synchronizing clients and maintaining file meta data, the elimination of the traditional Unix buffer cache from the file data access path, and the implementation of a disk block reservation scheme to correctly support Unix write() semantics. An evaluation of the technology is presented, providing insight into how it can be improved in the future, including several possible enhancements to Mach. As will be seen, most of this insight would equally apply to a single-node operating system based on Mach.