Shin Woo Kim, Sung Eun Park, Yong Kyu Lee, Gyoung Bae Kim, Bum Joo Shin

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 367-374, Dec. 2001
10.3745/KIPSTA.2001.8.4.367,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Recently, LINUX cluster file systems based on the storage area network (SAN) have been developed. In those systems, without using a central file server, multiple clients sharing the whole disk storage through Fibre Channel can freely access disk storage and act as file servers. Accordingly, they can offer advantages such as availability, load balancing, and scalability. In this paper, we describe metadata management schemes designed for a new SAN-based LINUX cluster file system. First, we present a new inode structure which is better than previous ones in disk block access time. Second, a new directory structure which uses extendible hashing is described. Third, we describe a novel scheme to manage free disk blocks, which is suitable for very large file systems. Finally, we present how we handle metadata journaling. Through performance evaluation, we show that our proposed schemes have better performance than previous ones.

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