Not quite NFS, soft cache consistency for NFS
Rick Macklem · 1994
There are some constraints inherent in the NFS^TM protocol that result in performance limitations for high performance workstation environments. This paper discusses an NFS-like protocol named Not Quite NFS (NQNFS), designed to address some of these limitations. This protocol provides full cache consistency during normal operation, while permitting more effective client-side caching in an effort to improve performance. There are also a variety of minor protocol changes, in order to resolve various NFS issues. The emphasis is on observed performance of a preliminary implementation of the protocol, in order to show how well this design works and to suggest possible areas for further improvement. 1. Introduction It has been observed that overall workstation performance has not been scaling with processor speed and that file system I/O is a limiting factor [Ousterhout90]. Ousterhout notes that a principal challenge for operating system developers is the decoupling of system calls from th...