DLLFS - A Caching Mechanism for a Distributed File System

Distributed systems grew in popularity and prominence in the last decade mainly because existing applications need huge amounts of resources that cannot reside on a single computer. The main method of storing and organizing data in computing devices is provided by file systems. The need to easily share data between different computers led to the idea of distributed file systems. Such a technology allows a user to ’see’ data on remote computers as if it was his own. One of the most important issues that must be regarded when designing a distributed file system is performance. Existing implementations show that significant increase in performance can be achieved by using a caching mechanism. The purpose of this article is to examine various approaches on caching and to present an implementation of such a mechanism for CoreFS which is a file system built on top of the FUSE library that runs in user space.