Richer File System Metadata Using Links and Attributes
Alexander Ames, Nikhil Bobb, Scott A. Brand, Adam Hiat, Carlos Maltzahn, Ethan L.
Miller, Alisa Neeman, Deepa Tuteja, Richer File System Metadata Using Links
and Attributes, Mass Storage Systems Technologies (MSST2005), Monterey,
CA, April 11-14, 2005
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.
