Performance Analysis and Optimization of the Hurricane File System ...

CHAPTER 8. CONCLUSIONS 85
writing to a single shared disk may experience scalability problems. Tasks to further increase parallelism
include the following.
1. Completing the redesign of HFS meta-data organization.
2. Implementing per disk queues in the disk interface objects (Figure 3.1), as found in the original
version of HFS, to enable more capabilities and control of disks, leading to disk-based optimizations
such as prefetching and scheduling.
3. Porting the HFS user-level library (Figure 3.1) to enable the flexibility of HFS to be fully exploited.
Now that the core of the file system has been optimized, we need to focus on the interaction between
the file system and the operating system. It is currently an open research issue of finding the optimal way
for the K42 operating system to interact with various file systems. How do we design a single file system
interface that contains enough flexibility to fully exploit the capabilities of a variety of file systems and fully
exploit the capabilities of K42? HFS was designed for micro-kernel operating systems and therefore, its
operating behavior is very compatible with the K42 operating system. Other file systems may not integrate
as smoothly.
This thesis represents an initial step in file system research on K42. Hopefully, it will provide guidance
on further improving file system scalability.