The Design and Implementation of the Inversion File System.pdf

The Design and Implementation of the Inversion File System Michael A. Olson – University of California at Berkeley1 ABSTRACT 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 advantage of the POSTGRES no-overwrite storage manager. File data are stored in the database, so Conventional file systems handle naming and that file updates are transaction-protected. In addi- layout of chunks of user data. Users may move tion, the user may ask to see the state of the file sys- around in the file system’s namespace, and may typi- tem at any time in the past. All transactions that c