Preparation for Recitation on ZFS

Read The Zettabyte File System. It was published in the Usenix Symposium on File and Storage Technologies in 2003. This is your third file system; you have now read about the Unix Filesystem, GFS, and now ZFS.

The Introduction of the paper highlights the goals of the system and Section 2 discusses what the authors identify as their design principles. Section 3 describes their design, both the supporting elements and their approach to providing the POSIX layer. POSIX is the "Portable Operating System Interface" standardized by the IEEE for providing compatibility with various versions of Unix. Section 4 considers several use scenarios, although Section 5, in discussing design tradeoffs identities several key issues that are not considered in Section 4. The paper concludes with several brief sections on related work, future work, the current status and conclusions.

To check whether you understand the design of ZFS, you should be able to answer the following questions:

As you read the paper, consider the following questions:

Question for Recitation

Before you come to this recitation, you'll turn in a brief answer to the following questions (really—we don't need more than a sentence or so for each question). Your TA will be in touch about exactly how to turn that in.

Your answers to these questions should be in your own words, not direct quotations from the paper.

As always, there are multiple correct answers for each of these questions.

Notes

Supplemental notes for this recitation. These, along with our Sunday office hours are intended to help students who had to miss a recitation due to isolation, but they're also a useful resource for preparing for exams.