Network distributed file system in user space

Abstract

File systems have traditionally been implemented in the operating system's kernel to ensure maximum possible speed and integration with the rest of the operating system, and this was true even for network file systems such as NFS. However, available CPU power on mainstream architectures continues to increase daily at a rate which is not closely followed by speed of computer network equipment. When considering development of network-distributed file systems today it becomes clear that speed improvements offered by pure kernel-side implementations are no longer significant given the bandwidth and latencies of computer networks. Recent efforts in enabling user-space file system implementations on free/open source Unix-like operating systems have made it possible to create a solution for distributing file system data over computer networks entirely in user-space. In this work we present such a solution $the trivially distributed file system