The Design and Implementation of the Inversion File System.
Mark Anthony Olson · 1993
This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of the Inversion file system. Inversion provides a rich set of services to file system users, and manages a large tertiary data store. Inversion is built on top of the POSTGRES database system, and takes advantage of low-level DBMS services to provide transaction protection, fine-grained time travel, and fast crash recovery for user files and file system metadata. Inversion gets between 30% and 80% of the throughput of ULTRIX NFS backed by a non-volatile RAM cache. In addition, Inversion allows users to provide code for execution directly in the file system manager, yielding performance as much as seven times better than that of ULTRIX NFS. Introduction Conventional file systems handle naming and layout of chunks of user data. Users may move around in the file system's namespace, and may typically examine a small set of attributes of any given chunk of data. Most file systems guarantee some degree of consistency of user...