Florin Isaila
Department of Computer Science
University of Karlsruhe
florin@ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de
File systems are parts of the operating systems that manage the storage devices. The storage devices may be either computer-attached or network-attached. The devices are organized in linear files. A logical file name space and a protection mechanism are offered to the applications.
In this paper we provide an overview of the state of the art in file systems. We present issues related to both local and distributed file systems. We describe distributed file system architectures for different kinds of network connectivity: tightly connected networks (clusters), loosely connected networks (computational grids) or disconnected networks( occurring in mobile computing). File systems architectures for both network-attached and computer-attached storage are reviewed. We show how the parallel file systems address the parallel application I/O requirements. We explore different file sharing semantics in distributed and parallel file systems. We present how efficient metadata management can be realized in journalled file systems.