From: eric@ms.uky.edu (Eric H. Herrin II) Subject: VIFS interest Date: 23 Feb 1993 19:55:31 GMT
I am currently evaluating the interest in porting VIFS to
Linux. If there is enough interest, I will do the port this
summer. There is a tech-report in
ftp.ms.uky.edu:pub/tech-reports/UK/cs/225-93.ps.Z
describing the file system for those of you that would like
more information. When responding to the poll, please use
the subject line:
VIFS Linux Interest Poll
and send to eric@ms.uky.edu. I have had several people ask
me about this, so the purpose here is to determine whether
it is worth my time. The more people that respond, the
better the chances are that I will move the port up in
my summer priority list.
Other comments, suggestions, questions, etc. should be sent
to eric@ms.uky.edu with the subject "VIFS".
Here is an abstract of tech-report 225-93 for informational
purposes:
> Tech-report number: 225-93
> Date: January 1993
> Title: The Viva File System
> Authors: Eric H. Herrin II and Raphael A. Finkel
> E-mail: eric@ms.uky.edu and raphael@ms.uky.edu
> Abstract:
> This paper describes the Viva File System or VIFS, a technique
> for high-performance file allocation on disks. VIFS uses bitmaps
> to represent both free blocks on the disk and allocated blocks in
> each file. Allocation bitmaps provide a very fast method of
> finding blocks close to the last allocated block in a file.
> Fragments (partial blocks) are used to store the overflow from
> the last file block; the minimum size of a fragment is chosen
> when the file system is initialized. Conventional file systems,
> such as the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS), can store a file
> containing 96KB of data without using indirect blocks and around
> 16 MB of data for each indirect block. With the same block size,
> VIFS can store up to about 10 MB of data without using indirect
> blocks and up to 500 MB of data per indirect block. The design
> of VIFS allows some previously synchronous operations to occur
> asynchronously, resulting in significant speed improvements over
> FFS. VIFS provides multiple read-ahead to maintain its high
> speed when several processes are competing for disk accesses.
> This paper provides experimental measurements taken from an im-
> plementation of Viva in a BSD 4.3 kernel. The measurements show
> that VIFS is significantly faster than FFS for nearly all file
> system operations.
> --