Employing intelligence in object-based storage devices to provide attribute-based file access

A file system with attribute-based access methods and a compatible access interface, using object-based storage devices (OSD), which fully utilizes existing features of the OSD standard (T10): object attributes and access methods are mapped into file attributes and the corresponding access interfaces respectively.

Abstract

Attribute-based file access has been regarded as a promising method to reach files based on their attributes rather than through the usual directory hierarchy, which is especially meaningful for locating the target among mass of files. However, because the attribute-based file system introduces higher performance overhead and is usually incompatible with existing file access interfaces, till now there are few practical attribute-based file systems. This paper designs a file system with attribute-based access methods and a compatible access interface, using object-based storage devices (OSD). In detail, this design fully utilizes existing features of the OSD standard (T10): object attributes and access methods are mapped into file attributes and the corresponding access interfaces respectively; collection-objects are used for fast indexing of user objects. Therefore, the attribute-based object organization can be achieved in OSD efficiently and the powerful processing capability of OSD is used to complete object-queries to speed up the performance. Moreover, the way to export the new accessing methods through file system with a compatible interface is also presented. Such a prototype has been implemented. Tests show that it introduces much less overheads than some existing attribute-based file systems, and the query performance is higher than its counterpart based on the block-level device.