The Box: A Replacement for Files

The file is a well-understood and very simple abstraction, which has been successfully used in both centralized and distributed systems. However, files are not expressive enough to capture high-level data semantics and relationships, including sharing and data dependencies. How many times has your operating system translated a JPEG figure into postscript, automatically when needed? How do files help applications to deal with heterogeneity? Moreover, optimization opportunities are lost due to the low-level nature of read and write; e.g. in NFS data is sent twice through the network when copying a remote file within the same file server. We feel that a better abstraction is needed and propose an alternate abstraction, the “box”, to solve the problems mentioned above. Boxes, while being as simple as files, are more expressive. We intend to use boxes as a central abstraction for a distributed adaptable operating system we are building.