CMSC 818e Day 3

September 05, 2018

These are notes taken during CMSC 818e: Distributed And Cloud-Based Storage Systems. Course webpage and syllabus here.

A Low-Bandwidth Network Filesystem

September 04, 2018

A network file system (NFS) is a protocol for writing distributed file systems. It gives me (for example) and my co-worker a way to access the same networked files from our local machines. While this is convenient, it can cause availability (lag) issues for really interactive applications. This post contains my notes from reading “A Low-bandwidth Network File System,” by Muthitacharoen, Chen, and Mazieres, who present a solution to this problem.

A Log-Structured Filesystem

September 04, 2018

Conventional file systems treat storage spatially, and when we as users want to change the files, the system seeks to the correct location and makes our changes in-place. In 1991, John K. Ousterhout and Mendel Rosenblum published a paper called “The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System,” which proposed a new way of treating memory storage. This post contains my notes and reactions from reading the paper.

What is a Filesystem?

September 03, 2018

What is a filesystem? In this post we’ll explore userspace filesystems, discuss their components, get to know the FUSE kernel module, and learn about bazil, a Go library that implements a userspace server for the Linux and OS X kernel protocols.

CMSC 818e Day 2

August 29, 2018

These are notes taken during CMSC 818e: Distributed And Cloud-Based Storage Systems. Course webpage and syllabus here.