Efficient user-level file cache management on the Sun Vnode interface

Abstract: "In developing a distributed file system, there are several good reasons for implementing the client file cache manager as a user-level process. These include ease of implementation, increased portability, and minimal impact on kernel size. For reasons of compatibility it is also desirable to use a standard file intercept mechanism on the client. The Sun VFS/Vnode file system interface is such a standard. However, this interface is designed for kernel-based file systems, and a user-level cache manager that used the Vnode mechanism would pay a large performance penalty due to the high number of kernel to cache manager context switches per file system call.This paper describes our solution to the problem for the Coda file system. By using a relatively small amount of kernel code to cache critical information, we are able to retain the much larger and more complex components of the Coda cache manager in a user level process. The measurements of Coda presented here confirm the performance benefits of this strategy, and indicate the relative merits of caching different kinds of information in the kernel.