Recovery in Spritely NFS
Jeffrey C. Mogul · 1994
ABSTRACT: NFS suffers from its lack of an explicit cache-consistency protocol. The Spritely NFS experiment, which grafted Sprite's cache-consistency protocol onto NFS, showed an improvement in NFS performance and consistency but failed to address the issue of server crash recovery. Several crash recovery mechanisms have been implemented for use with network file systems, but most are too complex to fit easily into the NFS design. Spritely NFS now uses a simple recovery protocol that requires almost no client-side support and guarantees consistent behavior even if the network is partitioned. This work demonstrates that one need not endure a stateless protocol for the sake of a simple implementation.