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Versatility and Unix semantics in namespace unification

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Dave, Jay Zadok, Erez Krishnan, Harikesavan Quigley, David P. Zubair, Mohammad Nayyer Wright, Charles P. Gupta, Puja
Copyright Year	2006
Abstract	Administrators often prefer to keep related sets of files in different locations or media, as it is easier to maintain them separately. Users, however, prefer to see all files in one location for convenience. One solution that accommodates both needs is virtual namespace unification---providing a merged view of several directories without physically merging them. For example, namespace unification can merge the contents of several CD-ROM images without unpacking them, merge binary directories from different packages, merge views from several file servers, and more. Namespace unification can also enable snapshotting by marking some data sources read-only and then utilizing copy-on-write for the read-only sources. For example, an OS image may be contained on a read-only CD-ROM image---and the user's configuration, data, and programs could be stored in a separate read-write directory. With copy-on-write unification, the user need not be concerned about the two disparate file systems.It is difficult to maintain Unix semantics while offering a versatile namespace unification system. Past efforts to provide such unification often compromised on the set of features provided or Unix compatibility---resulting in an incomplete solution that users could not use.We designed and implemented a versatile namespace unification system called $\textit{Unionfs}.$ Unionfs maintains Unix semantics while offering advanced namespace unification features: dynamic insertion and removal of namespaces at any point in the merged view, mixing read-only and read-write components, efficient in-kernel duplicate elimination, NFS interoperability, and more. Since releasing our Linux implementation, it has been used by thousands of users and over a dozen Linux distributions, which helped us discover and solve many practical problems.
Starting Page	74
Ending Page	105
Page Count	32
File Format	PDF
ISSN	15533077
e-ISSN	15533093
DOI	10.1145/1138041.1138045
Volume Number	2
Issue Number	1
Journal	ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2006-02-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Namespace management Directory merging Snapshotting Stackable file systems Unification
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Hardware and Architecture

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Versatility and unix semantics in namespace unification (2006)

Versatility and unix semantics in namespace unification (2006)

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