USP: A Lightweight File System Management Framework

Abstract

With data amount growing at an ever increasing rate, file system, as the basis of data management, its functionality and content are becoming more and more complex. Thus the file system is forced to be upgraded constantly, in order to satisfy the growing demands. However, the reinvention of new file systems is always a high-cost task. Although there are frameworks such as User-space File System that may help speeding up the development process, ease the pain of deploying new functions, they also bring in significant overhead, especially when file operation frequency is fairly high. We designed and implemented a lightweight file system management framework based on LD_PRELOAD in user-space referred to as User-Space Preload (USP), and tested several management tasks with it. According to the comparison with FUSE, USP-based file system management achieved an obvious performance improvement.