NFS, AFS, Sprite FS
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Readings
- Russel Sandberg et al., "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (1985)
This is the original NFS paper.
- John H. Howard et al., "Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System" (1988)
This paper describes AFS and compares it to NFS.
- Nelson, Welch, & Ousterhout, "Caching in the Sprite Network File System" (1988)
This paper compares Sprite to AFS and NFS.
Questions
- What were the key design goals of NFS, AFS, and Sprite's FS?
- How well did they achieve their goals?
- What are their limitations?
- How suitable are these filesystems in modern small networks? Enterprise networks? Internet-scale applications? Why?
Notes
Bell Labs
- tried to turn everything into a file
- wanted to make OS easier to use for programmers of their systems
- "simple" common API/protocol for I/O & IPC resources; "radical network transparency"
- focus on process communication
- portability
- code reuse (of their own code), but ignored legacy code problem
- "laziness" & "generality"
- move from centralized to distributed computing to make use of the individual machines
- resource utilization / efficiency
- with Plan 9, you don’t know when you’re using a network (network transparency), because everything is just a file
- is the overhead consistent? not always: this means that one can’t predict how "file" accesses will perform in the field
- reliability of "file" access relies on reliability of network and remote machines