Proceedings of 2000 USENIX Annual Technical Conference San Diego, California, USA, June 18–23, 2000 F I S T : A L A N G U A G E F O R S TA C K A B L E F I L E S Y S T E M S Erez Zadok and Jason Nieh THE ADVANCED COMPUTING SYSTEMS ASSOCIATION © 2000 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email:
[email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. FiST: A Language for Stackable File Systems Erez Zadok and Jason Nieh Computer Science Department, Columbia University ezk,nieh ¡ @cs.columbia.edu Abstract Media Common Avg. Code Size Type File System (C lines) Traditional file system development is difficult. Stack- Hard Disks UFS, FFS, EXT2FS 5,000–20,000 able file systems promise to ease the development of file Network NFS 6,000–30,000 systems by offering a mechanism for incremental develop- CD-ROM HSFS, ISO-9660 3,000–6,000 ment. Unfortunately, existing methods often require writ- Floppy PCFS, MS-DOS 5,000–6,000 ing complex low-level kernel code that is specific to a sin- gle operating system platform and also difficult to port. Table 1: Common Native Unix File Systems and Code Sizes for Each Medium We propose a new language, FiST, to describe stackable file systems.