The WAFL File System in Operating System

Because disk I/O has such a huge impact on system performance, file-system design and implementation command quite a lot of attention from system designers. Some file systems are general purpose, in that they can provide reasonable performance and functionality for a wide variety of file sizes, file types, and I/O loads. Others are optimized for specific tasks in an attempt to provide better performance in those areas than general-purpose file systems. The write-anywhere file layout (WAFL) from Network Appliance is an example of this sort of optimization. WAFL is a powerful, elegant file system optimized for random writes

WAFL is used exclusively on network file servers produced by Network Appliance and is meant for use as a distributed file system. It can provide files to clients via the NFS, CIFS, ftp, and http protocols, although it was designed just for NFS and CIFS. When many clients use these protocols to talk to a file server, the server may see a very large demand for random reads and an even larger demand for random writes. The NFS and CIFS protocols cache data from read operations, so writes are of the greatest concern to file-server creators.

WAFL is used on file servers that include an NVRAM cache for writes. The WAFL designers took advantage of running on a specific architecture to optimize the file system for random I/O, with a stable-storage cache in front. Ease of use is one of the guiding principles of WAFL. Its creators also designed it to include a new snapshot functionality that creates multiple read-only copies of the file system at different points in time

The WAFL file layout
The WAFL file layout

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