Two-level Hash/Table approach for metadata management in distributed file systems

AbFS is a distributed file system that makes it possible to efficiently share the inexpensive devices attached to the commodity computers of a cluster. The implementation of AbFS offers high-performance metadata management by combining hashing and tables in several levels, hierarchical structures and caches, and by combining the attributes and the namespace in the same structure. No additional layers are needed to implement caches because AbFS uses the Linux metadata caches, inode and dentry, to implement them. Along with the description of the proposed implementation for metadata management and the comparison with other implementations, this work provides experimental results to evaluate its performance obtained with a prototype made from scratch at kernel level. AbFS experimental results show that the implementation proposed is capable to manage files and directories with high performance.