A Comparison of Three Distributed File System Architectures: Vnode, Sprite, and Plan 9

A Comparison of the Vnode and Sprite File System Architectures

This paper compares the vnode architecture found in SunOS with the internal file system interfaces used in the Sprite distributed file system implementation. The emphasis of the comparison is on generalized support for remote access to file system resources, which include peripheral devices and IPC communication channels as well as regular files. A strong separation of the internal naming and I...

An Implementation of a Log-Structured File System for UNIX

Research results [ROSE91] demonstrate that a log-structured file system (LFS) offers the potential for dramatically improved write performance, faster recovery time, and faster file creation and deletion than traditional UNIX file systems. This paper presents a redesign and implementation of the Sprite [ROSE91] log-structured file system that is more robust and integrated into the vnode interfa...

The File System Belongs in the Kernel

This paper argues that a shared, distributed name space and I/O interface should be implemented inside the operating system kernel. The grounding for the argument is a comparison between the Sprite network operating system and the Mach microkernel. Sprite optimizes the common case of file and device access, both local and remote, by providing a kernel-level implementation. Sprite also allows fo...

Pseudo - File - Systems

This paper describes a facility that transparently extends the Sprite distributed file system to include foreign file systems and arbitrary user services. A pseudo-filesystem is a sub-tree of the distributed hierarchical name space that is implemented by a user-level server process. A pseudo-file-system fits naturally into the Sprite distributed system; the server runs on one host and access fr...

Naming , State Management , and User - Level Extensions in the Sprite Distributed File System