Recent questions tagged file-system

What are the advantages and disadvantages of providing mandatorylocks instead of advisory locks whose use is left to users’ discretion?

The open-file table is used to maintain information about files that arecurrently open. Should the operating system maintain a separate tablefor each user or maintain jus...

Consider a file system in which a file can be deleted and its disk spacereclaimed while links to that file still exist.What problems may occur ifa new file is created in ...

Researchers have suggested that, instead of having an access listassociated with each file (specifying which users can access the file,and how), we should have a user con...

Consider a system that supports 5,000 users. Suppose that you want toallow 4,990 of these users to be able to access one file.a. How would you specify this protection sch...

In some systems, a subdirectory can be read and written by anauthorized user, just as ordinary files can be.a. Describe the protection problems that could arise.b. Sugges...

Explain the purpose of the open() and close() operations.

Could you simulate a multilevel directory structure with a single-leveldirectory structure in which arbitrarily long names can be used? If youranswer is yes, explain how ...

Why do some systems keep track of the type of a file, while others leaveit to the user and others simply do not implement multiple file types?Which system is “better”?3- ...

Some systems automatically delete all user files when a user logs off ora job terminates, unless the user explicitly requests that they be kept.Other systems keep all fil...

Explain why logging metadata updates ensures recovery of a file system after a file-system crash.

Assume that in a particular augmentation of a remote-file-accessprotocol, each client maintains a name cache that caches translationsfrom file names to corresponding file...

Fragmentation on a storage device can be eliminated by recompactionof the information. Typical disk devices do not have relocation or baseregisters (such as those used wh...

Consider a file system that uses inodes to represent files. Disk blocksare 8 KB in size, and a pointer to a disk block requires 4 bytes. This filesystem has 12 direct dis...

Consider a file system on a disk that has both logical and physicalblock sizes of 512 bytes. Assume that the information about eachfile is already in memory. For each of ...

Discuss how performance optimizations for file systems might resultin difficulties in maintaining the consistency of the systems in the eventof computer crashes

Some file systems allow disk storage to be allocated at different levelsof granularity. For instance, a file system could allocate 4 KB of diskspace as a single 4-KB bloc...

Consider a system where free space is kept in a free-space list.a. Suppose that the pointer to the free-space list is lost. Can thesystem reconstruct the free-space list?...

What are the advantages of the variant of linked allocation that uses aFAT to chain together the blocks of a file?

Contrast the performance of the three techniques for allocating diskblocks (contiguous, linked, and indexed) for both sequential andrandom file access.

Consider a file system that uses a modifed contiguous-allocation scheme with support for extents. A file is a collection of extents, with each extent corresponding to a c...

Explain how the VFS layer allows an operating system to support multiple types of file systems easily.

Why is it advantageous to the user for an operating system to dynamicallyallocate its internal tables? What are the penalties to the operatingsystem for doing so?

How do caches help improve performance? Why do systems not usemore or larger caches if they are so useful?

One problem with contiguous allocation is that the user must preallocateenough space for each file. If the file grows to be larger than thespace allocated for it, special...

Consider a system that supports the strategies of contiguous, linked,and indexed allocation. What criteria should be used in deciding whichstrategy is best utilized for a...

Why must the bit map for file allocation be kept on mass storage, ratherthan in main memory?

What problems could occur if a system allowed a file system to bemounted simultaneously at more than one location?

Consider a file currently consisting of 100 blocks. Assume that the filecontrolblock (and the index block, in the case of indexed allocation)is already in memory. Calcula...