SOSP

This paper presents a new technique for disk storage management called a log-structured file system. A log-structured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and crash ...

A semantic file system is an information storage system that provides flexible associative access to the system's contents by automatically extracting attributes from files with file type specific transducers. Associative access is provided by a ...

In a shared memory multiprocessor with caches, executing tasks develop "affinity" to processors by filling their caches with data and instructions during execution. A scheduling policy that ignores this affinity may waste processing power by causing ...

A common operation in multiprocessor programs is acquiring a lock to protect access to shared data. Typically, the requesting thread is blocked if the lock it needs is held by another thread. The cost of blocking one thread and activating another can be ...

File system I/O is increasingly becoming a performance bottleneck in large distributed computer systems. This is due to the increased file I/O demands of new applications, the inability of any single storage structure to respond to these demands, and ...

Next-generation workstations will have hardware support for digital "continuous media" (CM) such as audio and video. CM applications handle data at high rates, with strict timing requirements, and often in small "chunks". If such applications are to run ...

We address the unique requirements of a multimedia file system such as continuous storage and retrieval of media, maintenance of synchronization between multiple media streams, and efficient manipulation of huge media objects. We present a model that ...

Threads are the vehicle for concurrency in many approaches to parallel programming. Threads separate the notion of a sequential execution stream from the other aspects of traditional UNIX-like processes, such as address spaces and I/O descriptors. The ...

It is often desirable, for reasons of clarity, portability, and efficiency, to write parallel programs in which the number of processes is independent of the number of available processors. Several modern operating systems support more than one process ...

We have improved the performance of the Mach 3.0 operating system by redesigning its internal thread and interprocess communication facilities to use continuations as the basis for control transfer. Compared to previous versions of Mach 3.0, our new ...

The study of operating systems level memory management policies for nonuniform memory access time (NUMA) shared memory multiprocessors is an area of active research. Previous results have suggested that the best policy choice often depends on the ...

Munin is a distributed shared memory (DSM) system that allows shared memory parallel programs to be executed efficiently on distributed memory multiprocessors. Munin is unique among existing DSM systems in its use of multiple consistency protocols and ...

We describe a theory of authentication and a system that implements it. Our theory is based on the notion of principal and a "speaks for" relation between principals. A simple principal either has a name or is a communication channel; a compound ...

Autonet is a switch-based local area network using 100 Mbit/s full-duplex point-to-point links. Crossbar switches are interconnected to other switches and to host controllers in an arbitrary pattern. Switch hardware uses the destination address in each ...

We analyzed the user-level file access patterns and caching behavior of the Sprite distributed file system. The first part of our analysis repeated a study done in 1985 of the: BSD UNIX file system. We found that file throughput has increased by a ...

Disconnected operation is a mode of operation that enables a client to continue accessing critical data during temporary failures of a shared data repository. An important, though not exclusive, application of disconnected operation is in supporting ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of the Harp file system. Harp is a replicated Unix file system accessible via the VFS interface. It provides highly available and reliable storage for files and guarantees that file operations are ...

All programs in the QuickSilver distributed system behave atomically with respect to their updates to permanent data. Operating system support for transactions provides the framework required to support this, as well as a mechanism that unifies ...