A File Is Not a File

Harter, Tyler; Dragga, Chris; Vaughn, Michael; Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C.; Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H.

doi:10.1145/2324876.2324878

Cited by 31 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We believe new file systems or novel features will continue to be developed to meet the ever-changing demands on file systems. Modern desktop applications show characteristics different from traditional workloads on file systems [33]. Atlidakis et al [34] pointed out modern operating systems are migrating to higher-level abstraction like SQLite [35].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

File Systems are Hard to Test — Learning from Xfstests

Aota

Kono

2019

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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Modern file systems, such as ext4, btrfs, and XFS, are evolving and enable the introduction of new features to meet ever-changing demands and improve reliability. File system developers are struggling to eliminate all software bugs, but the operating system community points out that file systems are a hotbed of critical software bugs. This paper analyzes the code coverage of xfstests, a widely used suite of file system tests, on three major file systems (ext4, btrfs, and XFS). The coverage is 72.34%, and the uncovered code runs into 23,232 lines of code. To understand why the code coverage is low, the uncovered code is manually examined line by line. We identified three major causes, peculiar to file systems, that hinder higher coverage. First, covering all the features is difficult because each file system provides a wide variety of file-system specific features, and some features can be tested only on special storage devices. Second, covering all the execution paths is difficult because they depend on file system configurations and internal on-disk states. Finally, the code for maintaining backward-compatibility is executed only when a file system encounters old formats. Our findings will help file system developers improve the coverage of test suites and provide insights into fostering the development of new methodologies for testing file systems.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

File Systems are Hard to Test — Learning from Xfstests

Aota

Kono

2019

IEICE Trans. Inf. & Syst.

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“…All these approaches are too sensitive to file access patterns and their performance degrade significantly if the workloads show weak locality. Many practical cases such as massive databases or data processing applications, unfortunately, show random access patterns [24]. Therefore, few researches such as [25] and [26] transform random write requests to sequential ones in hardware and virtualization layer, respectively, to improve the random write latency based on page-level mapping.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An implementation of low latency address-mapping logic for SSD controllers

Song

Chun

et al. 2019

IEICE Electron. Express

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Solid-state drives (SSDs) are replacing hard-disk drives (HDDs) because of their advantages of light weight, low power, and high speed. A flash translation layer (FTL) is a key to achieving a high efficiency in accessing an SSD. This letter presents an architecture to implement the mapping between the logical address and the physical address as hardwired to reduce the workload of the FTL inside an SSD.

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The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

Dinneen

Julien

2019

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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Computer users spend time every day interacting with digital files and folders, including downloading, moving, naming, navigating to, searching for, sharing, and deleting them. Such file management has been the focus of many studies across various fields, but has not been explicitly acknowledged nor made the focus of dedicated review. In this article we present the first dedicated review of this topic and its research, synthesizing more than 230 publications from various research domains to establish what is known and what remains to be investigated, particularly by examining the common motivations, methods, and findings evinced by the previously furcate body of work. We find three typical research motivations in the literature reviewed: understanding how and why users store, organize, retrieve, and share files and folders, understanding factors that determine their behavior, and attempting to improve the user experience through novel interfaces and information services. Relevant conceptual frameworks and approaches to designing and testing systems are described, and open research challenges and the significance for other research areas are discussed. We conclude that file management is a ubiquitous, challenging, and relatively unsupported activity that invites and has received attention from several disciplines and has broad importance for topics across information science.

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A File Is Not a File

Cited by 31 publications

References 22 publications

File Systems are Hard to Test — Learning from Xfstests

File Systems are Hard to Test — Learning from Xfstests

An implementation of low latency address-mapping logic for SSD controllers

The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

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