AFS - Andrew file system




AFS – Andrew file system

Andrew is a distributed computing environment designed and implemented at Carnegie Mellon University. The Andrew file system (AFS) constitutes the underlying information-sharing mechanism among clients of the environment. The Transarc Corporation took over development of AFS, then was purchased by IBM. IBM has since produced several commercial implementations of AFS.

AFS was subsequently chosen as the DFS for an industry coalition; the result was Transarc DFS, part of the distributed computing environment (DCE) from the OSF organization. In 2000, IBM's Transarc Lab announced that AFS would be an open-source product (termed OpenAFS) available under the IBM public license and Transarc DFS was canceled as a commercial product. OpenAFS is available under most commercial versions of UNIX as well as Linux and Microsoft Windows systems.

AFS - Andrew file system

Many UNIX vendors, as well as Microsoft, support the DCE system and its DFS, which is based on AFS, and work is ongoing to make DCE a cross-platform, universally accepted DFS. As AFS and Transarc DFS are very similar, we describe AFS throughout this section, unless Transarc DFS is named specifically.

AFS seeks to solve many of the problems of the simpler DFSs, such as NFS, and is arguably the most feature-rich nonexperimental DFS. It features a uniform name space, location-independent file sharing, client-side caching 17.6 An Example: AFS 655 with cache consistency, and secure authentication via Kerberos. It also includes server-side caching in the form of replicas, with high avail ability through automatic switchover to a replica if the source server is unavailable. One of the most formidable attributes of AFS is scalability: The Andrew system is targeted to span over 5,000 workstations. Between AFS and Transarc DFS, there are hundreds of implementations worldwide.

Overview on AFS

 AFS distinguishes between client machines (sometimes referred to as workstations) and dedicated server machines. Servers and clients originally ran only 4.2 BSD UNIX, but AFS has been ported to many operating systems. The clients and servers are interconnected by a network of LANs or WANs. Clients are presented with a partitioned space of file names: a local name space and a shared name space. Dedicated servers, collectively called Vice after the name of the software they run, present the shared name space to the clients as a homogeneous, identical, and location-transparent file hierarchy.

The local name space is the root file system of a workstation, from which the shared name space descends. Workstations run the Virtue protocol to communicate with Vice, and each is required to have a local disk where it stores its local name space.

Servers collectively are responsible for the storage and management of the shared name space. The local name space is small, is distinct for each workstation, and contains system programs essential for autonomous operation and better performance. Also local are temporary files and files that the workstation owner, for privacy reasons, explicitly wants to store locally. Viewed at a finer granularity, clients and servers are structured in clusters interconnected by a WAN. Each cluster consists of a collection of workstations on a LAN and a representative of Vice called a cluster server, and each cluster is connected to the WAN by a router.

 The decomposition into clusters is done primarily to address the problem of scale. For optimal performance, workstations should use the server on their own cluster most of the time, thereby making cross-cluster file references relatively infrequent. The file-system architecture is also based on considerations of scale. The basic heuristic is to offload work from the servers to the clients, in light of experience indicating that server CPU speed is the system's bottleneck. Following this heuristic, the key mechanism selected for remote file operations is to cache files in large chunks (64 KB). This feature reduces file-open latency and allows reads and writes to be directed to the cached copy without frequently involving the servers. Briefly, here are a few additional issues in the design of AFS:

  • Client mobility. Clients are able to access any file in the shared name space from any workstation. A client may notice some initial performance degradation due to the caching of files when accessing files from a workstation other than the usual one.
  • Security. The Vice interface is considered the boundary of trustworthiness, because no client programs are executed on Vice machines. Authentication and secure-transmission functions are provided as part of a connectionbased communication package based on the RPC paradigm. After mutual 656 Chapter 17 Distributed File Systems authentication, a Vice server and a client communicate via encrypted messages. Encryption is performed by hardware devices or (more slowly) in software. Information about clients and groups is stored in a protection database replicated at each server.
  • Protection. AFS provides access lists for protecting directories and the regular UNIX bits for file protection. The access list may contain information about those users allowed to access a directory, as well as information about those users not allowed to access it. Thus, it is simple to specify that everyone except, say, Jim can access a directory. AFS supports the access types read, write, lookup, insert, administer, lock, and delete.
  • Heterogeneity. Defining a clear interface to Vice is a key for integration of diverse workstation hardware and operating systems. So that heterogeneity is facilitated, some files in the local /bin directory are symbolic links pointing to machine-specific executable files residing in Vice.

The Shared Name Space

 AFS's shared name space is made up of component units called volumes. The volumes are unusually small component units. Typically, they are associated with the files of a single client. Few volumes reside within a single disk partition, and they may grow (up to a quota) and shrink in size. Conceptually, volumes are glued together by a mechanism similar to the UNIX mount mechanism. However, the granularity difference is significant, since in UNIX only an entire disk partition (containing a file system) canbe mounted. Volumes are a key administrative unit and play a vital role in identifying and locating an individual file.

 A Vice file or directory is identified by a low-level identifier called a fid. Each AFS directory entry maps a path-name component to a fid. A fid is 96 bits long and has three equal-length components: a volume number, a vnode number, and a iiniquifier. The vnode number is used as an index into an array containing the modes of files in a single volume. The uniquifier allows reuse of vnode numbers, thereby keeping certain data structures compact. Fids are location transparent; therefore, file movements from server to server do not invalidate cached directory contents. Location information is kept on a volume basis in a volume-location database replicated on each server. A client can identify the location of every volume in the system by querying this database.

 The aggregation of files into volumes makes it possible to keep the location database at a manageable size. To balance the available disk space and utilization of servers, volumes need to be migrated among disk partitions and servers. When a volume is shipped to its new location, its original server is left with temporary forwarding information, so that the location database does not need to be updated synchronously. While the volume is being transferred, the original server can still handle updates, which are shipped later to the new server. At some point, the volume is briefly disabled so that the recent modifications can be processed; then, the new volume becomes available again at the new site. The volume-movement operation is atomic; if either server crashes, the operation is aborted. 17.6 An Example: AFS 657 Read-only replication at the granularity of an entire volume is supported for system-executable files and for seldom-updated files in the upper levels of the Vice name space. The volume-location database specifies the server containing the only read-write copy of a volume and a list of read-only replication sites.

File Operations and Consistency Semantics

The fundamental architectural principle in AFS is the caching of entire files from servers. Accordingly, a client workstation interacts with Vice servers only during opening and closing of files, and even this interaction is not always necessary. Reading and writing files do not cause remote interaction (in contrast to the remote-service method). This key distinction has far-reaching ramifications for performance, as well as for semantics of file operations. The operating system on each workstation intercepts file-system calls and forwards them to a client-level process on that workstation. This process, called Venus, caches files from Vice when they are opened and stores modified copies of files back on the servers from which they came when they are closed.

Venus may contact Vice only when a file is opened or closed; reading and writing of individual bytes of a file are performed directly on the cached copy and bypass Venus. As a result, writes at some sites are not visible immediately at other sites. Caching is further exploited for future opens of the cached file. Venus assumes that cached entries (files or directories) are valid unless notified otherwise. Therefore, Venus does not need to contact Vice on a file open to validate the cached copy. The mechanism to support this policy, called callback, dramatically reduces the number of cache-validation requests received by servers. It works as follows. When a client caches a file or a directory, the server updates its state information to record this caching. We say that the client has a callback on that file. The server notifies the client before allowing another client to modify the file. In such a case, we say that the server removes the callback on the file for the former client. A client can use a cached file for open purposes only when the file has a callback. If a client closes a file after modifying it, all other clients caching this file lose their callbacks. Therefore, when these clients open the file later, they have to get the new version from the server.

Reading and writing bytes of a file are done directly by the kernel without Venus's intervention on the cached copy. Venus regains control when the file is closed. If the file has been modified locally, it updates the file on the appropriate server. Thus, the only occasions on which Venus contacts Vice servers are on opens of files that either are not in the cache or have had their callback revoked and on closes of locally modified files. Basically, AFS implements session semantics. The only exceptions are file operations other than the primitive read and write (such as protection changes at the directory level), which are visible everywhere on the network immediately after the operation completes. In spite of the callback mechanism, a small amount of cached validation traffic is still present, usually to replace callbacks lost because of machine or network failures.

 When a workstation is rebooted, Venus considers all cached 658 Chapter 17 Distributed File Systems files and directories suspect, and it generates a cache-validation request for the first use of each such entry. The callback mechanism forces each server to maintain callback information and each client to maintain validity information. If the amount of callback information maintained by a server is excessive, the server can break callbacks and reclaim some storage by unilaterally notifying clients and revoking the validity of their cached files. If the callback state maintained by Venus gets out of sync with the corresponding state maintained by the servers, some inconsistency may result. Venus also caches contents of directories and symbolic links, for pathname translation. Each component in the path name is fetched, and a callback is established for it if it is not already cached or if the client does not have a callback on it. Venus does lookups on the fetched directories locally, using fids. No requests are forwarded from one server to another.

 At the end of a path-name traversal, all the intermediate directories and the target file are in the cache with callbacks on them. Future open calls to this file will involve no network communication at all, unless a callback is broken on a component of the path name. The only exception to the caching policy is a modification to a directory that is made directly on the server responsible for that directory for reasons of integrity. The Vice interface has well-defined operations for such purposes. Venus reflects the changes in its cached copy to avoid re-fetching the directory.

Implementation of AFS

Client processes are interfaced to a UNIX kernel with the usual set of system calls. The kernel is modified slightly to detect references to Vice files in the relevant operations and to forward the requests to the client-level Venus process at the workstation. Venus carries out path-name translation component by component, as described above. It has a mapping cache that associates volumes to server locations in order to avoid server interrogation for an already known volume location. If a volume is not present in this cache, Venus contacts any server to which it already has a connection, requests the location information, and enters that information into the mapping cache.

Unless Venus already has a connection to the server, it establishes a new connection. It then uses this connection to fetch the file or directory. Connection establishment is needed for authentication and security purposes. When a target file is found and cached, a copy is created on the local disk. Venus then returns to the kernel, which opens the cached copy and returns its handle to the client process. The UNIX file system is used as a low-level storage system for both AFS servers and clients. The client cache is a local directory on the workstation's disk. Within this directory are files whose names are placeholders for cache entries.

Both Venus and server processes access UNIX files directly by the latter's modes to avoid the expensive path-name-to-inode translation routine (namei). Because the internal inode interface is not visible to client-level processes (both Venus and server processes are client-level processes), an appropriate set of additional system calls was added. DFS uses its own journaling file system to improve performance and reliability over UFS. 17.7 Summary 659 Venus manages two separate caches: one for status and the other for .data. It uses a simple least-recently-used (LRU) algorithm to keep each of them bounded in size. When a file is flushed from the cache, Venus notifies the appropriate server to remove the callback for this file. The status cache is kept in virtual memory to allow rapid servicing of stat() (file-status-returning) system calls.

The data cache is resident on the local disk, but the UNIX I/O buffering mechanism does some caching of disk blocks in memory that is transparent to Venus. A single client-level process on each file server services all file requests from clients. This process uses a lightweight-process package with non-preemptible scheduling to service many client requests concurrently. The RFC package is integrated with the lightweight-process package, thereby allowing the file server to concurrently make or service one RPC per lightweight process.

The RPC package is built on top of a low-level datagram abstraction. Whole-file transfer is implemented as a side effect of the RPC calls. One RPC connection exists per client, but there is no a priori binding of lightweight processes to these connections. Instead, a pool of lightweight processes services client requests on all connections. The use of a single multithreaded server process allows the caching of data structures needed to service requests. On the negative side, a crash of a single server process has the disastrous effect of paralyzing this particular server.



Frequently Asked Questions

+
Ans: Remote File Access Consider a user who requests access to a remote file. The server storing the file has been located by the naming scheme, and now the actual data transfer must take place. One way to achieve this transfer is through a remote-service mechanism, whereby requests for accesses are delivered to the server, the server machine performs the accesses, and their results are forwarded back to the user. One of the most common ways of implementing remote service is the remote procedure call (RPC) paradigm, which we discussed in Chapter 3. A direct analogy exists between disk-access methods in conventional file systems and the remote-service method in a DFS: Using the remote-service method is analogous to performing a disk access for each access request. To ensure reasonable performance of a remote-service mechanism, we can use a form of caching. In conventional file systems, the rationale for caching is to reduce disk I/O (thereby increasing performance), whereas in DFSs, the goal is to reduce both network traffic and disk I/O. In the following discussion, we describe the implementation of caching in a DFS and contrast it with the basic remote-service paradigm. view more..
+
Ans: Algorithm Evaluation How do we select a CPU scheduling algorithm for a particular system? there are many scheduling algorithms, each with its own parameters. As a result, selecting an algorithm can be difficult. The first problem is defining the criteria to be used in selecting an algorithm. As we saw in Section 5.2, criteria are often defined in terms of CPU utilization, response time, or throughput. To select an algorithm, we must first define the relative importance of these measures. Our criteria may include several measures, such as: • Maximizing CPU utilization under the constraint that the maximum response time is 1 second • Maximizing throughput such that turnaround time is (on average) linearly proportional to total execution time Once the selection criteria have been defined, we want to evaluate the algorithms under consideration. view more..
+
Ans: Firewalling to Protect Systems and Networks We turn next to the question of how a trusted computer can be connected safely to an untrustworthy network. One solution is the use of a firewall to separate trusted and untrusted systems. A firewall is a computer, appliance, or router that sits between the trusted and the untrusted. A network firewall limits network access between the two security domains and monitors and logs all connections. It can also limit connections based on source or destination address, source or destination port, or direction of the connection. For instance, web servers use HTTP to communicate with web browsers. A firewall therefore may allow only HTTP to pass from all hosts outside the firewall to the web server within the firewall. The Morris Internet worm used the f inger protocol to break into computers, so finger would not be allowed to pass, for example. view more..
+
Ans: Andrew is a distributed computing environment designed and implemented at Carnegie Mellon University. The Andrew file system (AFS) constitutes the underlying information-sharing mechanism among clients of the environment. The Transarc Corporation took over development of AFS, then was purchased by IBM. IBM has since produced several commercial implementations of AFS. AFS was subsequently chosen as the DFS for an industry coalition; the result was Transarc DFS, part of the distributed computing environment (DCE) from the OSF organization. In 2000, IBM's Transarc Lab announced that AFS would be an open-source product (termed OpenAFS) available under the IBM public license and Transarc DFS was canceled as a commercial product. OpenAFS is available under most commercial versions of UNIX as well as Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. view more..
+
Ans: Environmental Subsystems Environmental subsystems are user-mode processes layered over the native Windows XP executive services to enable Windows XP to run programs developed for other operating systems, including 16-bit Windows, MS-DOS, and POSIX. view more..
+
Ans: Atlas The Atlas operating system (Kilburn et al. [1961], Howarth et al. [1961]) was designed at the University of Manchester in England in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many of its basic features that were novel at the time have become standard parts of modern operating systems. Device drivers were a major part of the system. In addition, system calls were added by a set of special instructions called extra codes. Atlas was a batch operating system with spooling. Spooling allowed the system to schedule jobs according to the availability of peripheral devices, such as magnetic tape units, paper tape readers, paper tape punches, line printers, card readers, and card punches. 846 Chapter 23 Influential Operating Systems The most remarkable feature of Atlas, however, was its memory management. Core memory was new and expensive at the time. Many computers, like the IBM 650, used a drum for primary memory. view more..
+
Ans: XDS-940 The XDS-940 operating system (Lichtenberger and Pirtle [1965]) was designed at the University of California at Berkeley. Like the Atlas system, it used paging for memory management. Unlike the Atlas system, it was a time-shared system. The paging was used only for relocation; it was not used for demand paging. The virtual memory of any user process was made up of 16-KB words, whereas the physical memory was made up of 64-KB words view more..
+
Ans: THE The THE operating system (Dijkstra [1968], McKeag and Wilson [1976]) was designed at the Technische Hogeschool at Eindhoven in the Netherlands. It was a batch system running on a Dutch computer, the EL X8, with 32 KB of 27-bit words. The system was mainly noted for its clean design, particularly its layer structure, and its use of a set of concurrent processes employing semaphores for synchronization. Unlike the XDS-940 system, however, the set of processes in the THE system was static. view more..
+
Ans: RC 4000 The RC 4000 system, like the THE system, was notable primarily for its design concepts. It was designed for the Danish 4000 computer by Regnecentralen, particularly by Brinch-Hansen (Brinch-Hansen [1970], BrindvHansen [1973]). The objective was not to design a batch system, or a time-sharing system, or any other specific system. Rather, the goal was to create an operating-system nucleus, or kernel, on which a complete operating system could be built. Thus, the system structure was layered, and only the lower levels—comprising the kernel—were provided. The kernel supported a collection of concurrent processes. A round-robin CPU scheduler was used. Although processes could share memory, the primary communication and synchronization mechanism was the message system provided by the kernel. view more..
+
Ans: Example: The WAFL File System Disk I/O has a huge impact on system performance. As a result, file-system design and implementation command quite a lot of attention from system designers. Some file systems are general purpose, in that they can provide reasonable performance and functionality for a wide variety of file sizes, file types, and I/O loads. Others are optimized for specific tasks in an attempt to provide better performance in those areas than general-purpose file systems. The WAFL file system from Network Appliance is an example of this sort of optimization. WAFL, the ivrite-nin/wherc file layout, is a powerful, elegant file system optimized for random writes. view more..
+
Ans: The Security Problem In many applications, ensuring the security of the computer system is worth considerable effort. Large commercial systems containing payroll or other financial data are inviting targets to thieves. Systems that contain data pertaining to corporate operations may be of interest to unscrupulous competitors. Furthermore, loss of such data, whether by accident or fraud, can seriously impair the ability of the corporation to function. view more..
+
Ans: Networking Windows XP supports both peer-to-peer and client-server networking. It also has facilities for network management. The networking components in Windows XP provide data transport, interprocess communication, file sharing across a network, and the ability to send print jobs to remote printers. view more..
+
Ans: Compression Because of the size and rate requirements of multimedia systems, multimedia files are often compressed from their original form to a much smaller form. Once a file has been compressed, it takes up less space for storage and can be delivered to a client more quickly. Compression is particularly important when the content is being streamed across a network connection. In discussing file compression, we often refer to the compression ratio, which is the ratio of the original file size to the size of the compressed file. For example, an 800-KB file that is compressed to 100 KB has a compression ratio of 8:1. view more..
+
Ans: Requirements of Multimedia Kernels As a result of the characteristics described in Section 20.1.2, multimedia applications often require levels of service from the operating system that differ from the requirements of traditional applications, such as word processors, compilers, and spreadsheets. Timing and rate requirements are perhaps the issues of foremost concern, as the playback of audio and video data demands that the data be delivered within a certain deadline and at a continuous, fixed rate. Traditional applications typically do not have such time and rate constraints. view more..
+
Ans: What Is Multimedia? The term multimedia describes a wide range of applications that are in popular use today. These include audio and video files such as MP3 audio files, DVD movies, and short video clips of movie previews or news stories downloaded over the Internet. Multimedia applications also include live webcasts (broadcast over the World Wide Web) of speeches or sporting events and even live webcams that allow a viewer in Manhattan to observe customers at a cafe in Paris. Multimedia applications need not be either audio or video; rather, a multimedia application often includes a combination of both. For example, a movie may consist of separate audio and video tracks. Nor must multimedia applications be delivered only to desktop personal computers. Increasingly, they are being directed toward smaller devices, including personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones. view more..
+
Ans: CPU Scheduling We distinguished between soft real-time systems and hard real-time systems. Soft real-time systems simply give scheduling priority to critical processes. A soft real-time system ensures that a critical process will be given preference over a noncritical process but provides no guarantee as to when the critical process will be scheduled. A typical requirement of continuous media, however, is that data must be delivered to a client by a certain deadline; data that do not arrive by the deadline are unusable. Multimedia systems thus require hard real-time scheduling to ensure that a critical task will be serviced within a guaranteed period of time. Another scheduling issue concerns whether a scheduling algorithm uses static priority or dynamic priority—a distinction view more..
+
Ans: Disk Scheduling we focused primarily on systems that handle conventional data; for these systems, the scheduling goals are fairness and throughput. As a result, most traditional disk schedulers employ some form of the SCAN (Section 12.4.3) or C-SCAN (Section 12.4.4) algorithm. Continuous-media files, however, have two constraints that conventional data files generally do not have: timing deadlines and rate requirements. These two constraints must be satisfied to preserve QoS guarantees, and diskscheduling algorithms must be optimized for the constraints. Unfortunately, these two constraints are often in conflict. Continuous-media files typically require very high disk-bandwidth rates to satisfy their data-rate requirements. Because disks have relatively low transfer rates and relatively high latency rates, disk schedulers must reduce the latency times to ensure high bandwidth. view more..
+
Ans: Network Management Perhaps the foremost QoS issue with multimedia systems concerns preserving rate requirements. For example, if a client wishes to view a video compressed with MPEG-1, the quality of service greatly depends on the system's ability to deliver the frames at the required rate.. Our coverage of issues such as CPU- and disk-scheduling algorithms has focused on how these techniques can be used to better meet the quality-ofservice requirements of multimedia applications. However, if the media file is being streamed over a network—perhaps the Internet—issues relating to how the network delivers the multimedia data can also significantly affect how QoS demands are met. In this section, we explore several network issues related to the unique demands of continuous media. Before we proceed, it is worth noting that computer networks in general —and the Internet in particular— currently do not provide network protocols that can ensure the delivery of data with timing requirements. (There are some proprietary protocols—notably those running on Cisco routers—that do allow certain network traffic to be prioritized to meet QoS requirements. view more..




Rating - 3/5
491 views

Advertisements