Understand the design and issue of the original NetApp file server.
Reading Assignments
David Hitz, James Lau, and Michael Malcolm. File system design
for an NFS file server appliance.
Winter
USENIX Technical Conference (San
Francisco, CA, 17–21 January 1994), pages 235–246. USENIX Association, 1994.
Issues
This paper describes the internals of WAFL, the NetApp's file system which
has a built-in mechanism to take snapshots. Is possible to implement
snapshots with a ordinary file system that does not have such a built-in
mechanism? If you think the answer is yes, please outline how you would
build add-on snapshots. If you think the answer is no, please briefly
describe why not.