UNIT IV

File System Implementation

 File-System Structure
 File-System Implementation
 Directory Implementation
 Allocation Methods
 Free-Space Management
 Efficiency and Performance
 Recovery
 Log-Structured File Systems

Operating System Concepts 11.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Objectives
 To describe the details of implementing local file systems and
directory structures
 To describe the implementation of remote file systems
 To discuss block allocation and free-block algorithms and trade-offs

Operating System Concepts 11.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 File-System Structure
 File structure
 Logical storage unit
 Collection of related information
 File system resides on secondary storage (disks)
 File system organized into layers
 File control block – storage structure consisting of information
about a file

Operating System Concepts 11.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Layered File System

Manages Metadata
information (FCB)

Knows about files and their

logical blocks, as well as
physical blocks.

Needs only to issue

generic commands to
appropriate device drivers
to read and write physical
blocks on the disk.
Consists of device drivers
and interrupt handlers to
transfer information
between main memory and
disk systems.
Operating System Concepts 11.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005
 A Typical File Control Block

ACL – Access control list

Operating System Concepts 11.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005
 Allocation Methods
 An allocation method refers to how disk blocks are allocated for
files:

 Contiguous allocation

 Linked allocation

 Indexed allocation

Operating System Concepts 11.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Contiguous Allocation

 Each file occupies a set of contiguous blocks on the disk

 Simple – only starting location (block #) and length (number of blocks) are
required

 Determining how much space is needed for a file is difficult.

 Wasteful of space (dynamic storage-allocation problem) – External

fragmentation.

 Files cannot grow

 Both sequential and Random access can be supported.

Operating System Concepts 11.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Contiguous Allocation of Disk Space

Operating System Concepts 11.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Extent-Based Systems
 Many newer file systems (I.e. Veritas File System) use a modified
contiguous allocation scheme

 Extent-based file systems allocate disk blocks in extents

 An extent is a contiguous block of disks

 Extents are allocated for file allocation
 A file consists of one or more extents.

Operating System Concepts 11.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Linked Allocation
 Each file is a linked list of disk blocks: blocks may be scattered
anywhere on the disk.

block = pointer

Operating System Concepts 11.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Linked Allocation (Cont.)

 Simple – need only starting address

 Free-space management system – waste of space (for

storing pointers) - Clustering capability.

 File-allocation table (FAT) – disk-space allocation used by

MS-DOS and OS/2.

 No External Fragmentation – Any free block on the free-

space list can be used to satisfy a request.

 Not – Reliable, so use Doubly Linked List.

Operating System Concepts 11.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Linked Allocation

Operating System Concepts 11.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 File-Allocation Table

Operating System Concepts 11.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Indexed Allocation
 Brings all pointers together into the index block.
 Logical view.

index table

Need index table

Random access
Dynamic access without external fragmentation, but have overhead
of index block.

Operating System Concepts 11.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Example of Indexed Allocation

Operating System Concepts 11.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Free-Space Management

 Disk space is limited , so we need to reuse the space from deleted files for new
files.

 To keep track of these disk space, the system maintains a free- space list

 Implementation of Free – space Management:

 Bit Vector Method.
 Linked List Method.
 Grouping.
 Counting.

Operating System Concepts 11.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Free-Space Management
 Bit vector (n blocks)
0 1 2 n-1
…

1  block[i] free


bit[i] =
0  block[i] occupied

For Example, consider a disk where the blocks

2,3,4,5,8,9,10,11,12,13,17,18,25,26,27 are free, and the rest of
the blocks are allocated. The free space bit map would be
001111001111110001100000011100000…
Block number calculation:
(number of bits per word) * (number of 0-value words) + offset of
first 1 bit

Operating System Concepts 11.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 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)
 Easy to get contiguous files
 Linked list (free list)
 Cannot get contiguous space easily
 No waste of space
 Grouping
 Counting

Operating System Concepts 11.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Linked Free Space List on Disk

Recovery

Operating System Concepts 11.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Recovery
 Consistency checking – compares data in directory structure with
data blocks on disk, and tries to fix inconsistencies (Consistency
checker)

 Use system programs to back up data from disk to another storage

device (floppy disk, magnetic tape, other magnetic disk, optical)
 Full Backup
 Incremental Backup

 Recover lost file or disk by restoring data from backup

Operating System Concepts 11.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Log Structured File Systems
 Log structured (or journaling) file 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

Operating System Concepts 11.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Problem

Process Starting Bock Address Length

P1 12 3
P2 3 5
P3 20 4
P4 8 4

Represent the above data’s using various File allocations in Disk.

Assume the index block(12) contains the addresses 10, 14, 9, 22, 18

Operating System Concepts 11.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 The Sun Network File System (NFS)
 An implementation and a specification of a software system for
accessing remote files across LANs (or WANs)

 The implementation is part of the Solaris and SunOS operating

systems running on Sun workstations using an unreliable datagram
protocol (UDP/IP protocol and Ethernet

Operating System Concepts 11.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS (Cont.)
 Interconnected workstations viewed as a set of independent
machines with independent file systems, which allows sharing
among these file systems in a transparent manner
 A remote directory is mounted over a local file system directory
 The mounted directory looks like an integral subtree of the
local file system, replacing the subtree descending from the
local directory
 Specification of the remote directory for the mount operation is
nontransparent; the host name of the remote directory has to
be provided
 Files in the remote directory can then be accessed in a
transparent manner
 Subject to access-rights accreditation, potentially any file
system (or directory within a file system), can be mounted
remotely on top of any local directory

Operating System Concepts 11.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS (Cont.)
 NFS is designed to operate in a heterogeneous environment of
different machines, operating systems, and network architectures;
the NFS specifications independent of these media

 This independence is achieved through the use of RPC primitives

built on top of an External Data Representation (XDR) protocol
used between two implementation-independent interfaces

 The NFS specification distinguishes between the services provided

by a mount mechanism and the actual remote-file-access services

Operating System Concepts 11.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Three Independent File Systems

Operating System Concepts 11.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Mounting in NFS

Mounts Cascading mounts

Operating System Concepts 11.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS Mount Protocol
 Establishes initial logical connection between server and client
 Mount operation includes name of remote directory to be mounted and
name of server machine storing it
 Mount request is mapped to corresponding RPC and forwarded to
mount server running on server machine
 Export list – specifies local file systems that server exports for
mounting, along with names of machines that are permitted to
mount them
 Following a mount request that conforms to its export list, the server
returns a file handle—a key for further accesses
 File handle – a file-system identifier, and an inode number to identify
the mounted directory within the exported file system
 The mount operation changes only the user’s view and does not affect
the server side

Operating System Concepts 11.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS Protocol
 Provides a set of remote procedure calls for remote file operations.
The procedures support the following 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
(NFS V4 is just coming available – very different, stateful)
 Modified data must be committed to the server’s disk before results
are returned to the client (lose advantages of caching)
 The NFS protocol does not provide concurrency-control
mechanisms

Operating System Concepts 11.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Three Major Layers of NFS Architecture

 UNIX file-system interface (based on the open, read, write, and

close calls, and file descriptors)

 Virtual File System (VFS) layer – distinguishes local files from

remote ones, and local files are further distinguished according to
their file-system types
 The VFS activates file-system-specific operations to handle
local requests according to their file-system types
 Calls the NFS protocol procedures for remote requests

 NFS service layer – bottom layer of the architecture

 Implements the NFS protocol

Operating System Concepts 11.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Schematic View of NFS Architecture

Operating System Concepts 11.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS Path-Name Translation
 Performed by breaking the path into component names and
performing a separate NFS lookup call for every pair of component
name and directory vnode

 To make lookup faster, a directory name lookup cache on the

client’s side holds the vnodes for remote directory names

Operating System Concepts 11.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 NFS Remote Operations
 Nearly one-to-one correspondence between regular UNIX system
calls and the NFS protocol RPCs (except opening and closing files)
 NFS adheres to the remote-service paradigm, but employs
buffering and caching techniques for the sake of performance
 File-blocks cache – when a file is opened, the kernel checks with
the remote server whether to fetch or revalidate the cached
attributes
 Cached file blocks are used only if the corresponding cached
attributes are up to date
 File-attribute cache – the attribute cache is updated whenever new
attributes arrive from the server
 Clients do not free delayed-write blocks until the server confirms
that the data have been written to disk

Operating System Concepts 11.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Example: WAFL File System
 Used on Network Appliance “Filers” – distributed file system
appliances
 “Write-anywhere file layout”
 Serves up NFS, CIFS, http, ftp
 Random I/O optimized, write optimized
 NVRAM for write caching
 Similar to Berkeley Fast File System, with extensive modifications

Operating System Concepts 11.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 The WAFL File Layout

Operating System Concepts 11.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 Snapshots in WAFL

Operating System Concepts 11.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

 11.02

Operating System Concepts 11.38 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2005

End