John Floren

Abstract

The Plan 9 operating system from Bell Labs has broken a great deal of new ground in the realm of operating systems, providing a lightweight, network-centric OS with private namespaces and other important concepts. In Plan 9, all file operations, whether local or over the network, take place through the 9P file protocol. Although 9P is both simple and powerful, developments in computer and network hardware have over time outstripped the performance of 9P. Today, file operations, especially copying files over a network, are much slower with 9P than with protocols such as HTTP or FTP. 9P operates in terms of reads and writes with no buffering or caching; it is essentially a translation of the Unix file operations (open, read, write, close, etc.) into network messages. Given that the original Unix systems only dealt with files on local disks, it seemed that it may be necessary to extend 9P (and the file I/O programming libraries) to take into consideration the fact that many files now exist at the other end of network links. Other researchers have attempted to rectify the problem of network file performance through caching and other programmer-transparent fixes, but there is a second option. Streams (a continuous flow of data from server to client) allow programmers to read and write data sequentially (an extremely common case) while reducing the number of protocol messages and avoiding some of the problems with round-trip latency. By adding streaming to the 9P protocol and extending the regular POSIX I/O functions, this work allows programmers to perform sequential file operations at speeds much closer to those of HTTP. Files are transferred using out-of-band TCP connections between the client and server. In tests, streaming allowed files to be transferred at equal or superior speeds to HTTP.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Computer network protocols; File Transfer Protocol (Computer network protocol); Operating systems (Computers); File organization (Computer science)

Publication Date

12-1-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Shaaban, Muhammad

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works. Physical copy available through RIT's The Wallace Library at: TK5105.55 .F56 2010

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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