Summary: | The rapid growth of the Internet drives research and industry in the field of network
computing systems. Various such systems have been developed to provide better
performance for Internet services. With the introduction of Virtual Interface (VI) and
other new interconnect technologies, a new file access protocol - Direct Access File
System (DAFS) is being proposed that may leverage these technologies to create a new
network computing system.
DAFS is based on NFS version 4. However, since it is for a local file sharing
environment and built on new interconnection technologies, it is quite different from
NFS version 4 in certain aspects. By eliminating the memory copy and operating system
involvement during data transfer, DAFS has been shown to have much better
performance than NFS version 4 has.
Building a DAFS server in the Linux kernel is essentially the motivation behind
this thesis. By implementing basic file operations in DAFS, we are able to compare the
DAFS performance results with those from NFS systems. Focusing on the development
of the file locking mechanism in DAFS, we are interested to see how two new locks
introduced by DAFS - Persist Locks and AutoRecovery Locks - work in network file
systems.
In this thesis, we describe the VI technologies, DAFS protocol, and issues related
to the design and implementation of a DAFS server in the Linux kernel. We also
describe the file locking mechanism and the implementation related issues in DAFS.
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