Design Considerations for Developing a Disk File System
Wasim Ahmad Bhat · 2012
File system design has never been a straight forward task. Moreover, designing and developing a disk file system is a complex case of file system development. From time to time, since the inception of first magnetic disk in 1956, many disk file systems were drafted and implemented to fit the need of users and/or to cope up with the change in hardware technology. This has resulted into many objective specific disk file systems and hence, no generalized design guidelines or criteria have been developed. In this paper, we take some historical facts and current trends in digital world as a base to figure out 3 basic design parameters for designing and developing a disk file system which are affected by the change in hardware technology and user requirements. In each identified design parameter, we give a brief introduction of some novel approach to mitigate the parameter. Furthermore, we also introduce a new file system benchmarking technique to overcome problems found in existing techniques. The goal of this paper is to organize the design considerations for developing a disk file system and thus, help a file system designer to efficiently design and develop a new file system from scratch or refine or fine tune existing ones.