LiFS: An attribute-rich file system for storage class memories

As the number and variety of files stored and accessed by a typical user has dramatically increased, existing file system structures have begun to fail as a mechanism for managing all of the information contained in those files. Many applications—email clients, multimedia management applications, and desktop search engines are examples—have been forced to develop their own richer metadata infrastructures. While effective, these solutions are generally non-standard, non-portable, non-sharable across applications, users or platforms, proprietary, and potentially inefficient. In the interest of providing a rich, efficient, shared file system metadata infrastructure, we have developed the Linking File System (LiFS). Taking advantage of nonvolatile storage class memories, LiFS supports a wide variety of user and application metadata needs while efficiently supporting traditional file system operations. 1