Richer File System Metadata Using Links and Attributes Abstract

Traditional file systems provide a weak and inadequate structure for meaningful representations of file interrelationships and other context-providing metadata. Existing designs, which store additional file-oriented metadata either in a database, on disk, or both are limited by the technologies upon which they depend. Moreover, they do not provide for user-defined relationships among files. To address these issues, we created the Linking File System (LiFS), a file system design in which files may have both arbitrary user- or application-specified attributes, and attributed links between files. In order to assure performance when accessing links and attributes, the system is designed to store metadata in non-volatile memory. This paper discusses several use cases that take advantage of this approach and describes the user-space prototype we developed to test the concepts presented. 1

Graffiti: A framework for testing collaborative distributed metadata

The growth in metadata has been triggered by two key catalyzing events. The first is the explosive growth in storage size and storage demands. As the number and variety of files grows the need for metadata to organize this informatio

LiFS: An attribute-rich file system for storage class memories

As the number and variety of files stored and accessed by a typical user has dramatically increased, existing file system structures have begun to fail as a mechanism for managing all of the information contained in those files. Many applications—email clients, multimedia management applications, and desktop search engines are examples—have been forced to develop their own richer metadata infrastructures. While effective, these solutions are generally non-standard, non-portable, non-sharable across applications, users or platforms, proprietary, and potentially inefficient. In the interest of providing a rich, efficient, shared file system metadata infrastructure, we have developed the Linking File System (LiFS). Taking advantage of nonvolatile storage class memories, LiFS supports a wide variety of user and application metadata needs while efficiently supporting traditional file system operations. 1

Abstract LiFS: An Attribute-Rich File System for Storage Class Memories

As the number and variety of files stored and accessed by a typical user has dramatically increased, existing file system structures have begun to fail as a mechanism for managing all of the information contained in those files. Many applications—email clients, multimedia management applications, and desktop search engines are examples— have been forced to develop their own richer metadata infrastructures. While effective, these solutions are generally non-standard, non-portable, non-sharable across applications, users or platforms, proprietary, and potentially inefficient. In the interest of providing a rich, efficient, shared file system metadata infrastructure, we have developed the Linking File System (LiFS). Taking advantage of non-volatile storage class memories, LiFS supports a wide variety of user and application metadata needs while efficiently supporting traditional file system operations.