In-Kernel Berkeley DB Databases

Operating system code often needs to organize data about various objects efficiently. This data organization occurs in two places: in memory (e.g., a page cache) or on persistent storage media (e.g., a file system). To keep kernel code stable, the data structures and algorithms used are often very simple: linked lists, hash tables, etc. In this project we port the Berkeley DB (BDB) software to become a kernel service that any other component can use. Applications include highly-scalable and efficient cache organization, augmenting attributes for existing file systems, and more.

One of the applications we are building is a file system that uses BDB as its backing store. This way we can experiment with different data organization schemes and compare the efficiency of a BDB-based file system to a native one (e.g., ext3). Our ultimate goal is to create a file system that has the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) of a database both internally and exported to the user. The VFS layer manages several caches (inode, directory name lookup, and page) and they are highly integrated. Having these caches in front of the database engine means that providing ACID properties is not possible (because the database needs to monitor all accesses). We are developing an infrastructure that will handle both ACID-enabled and traditional file systems simultaneously.

Download software.

Conference and Workshop Papers:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Rapid File System Development Using ptrace PS PDF BibTeX Proceedings of the Workshop on Experimental Computer Science (EXPCS 2007), in conjunction with ACM FCRC Jun 2007  
2 I3FS: An In-Kernel Integrity Checker and Intrusion Detection File System PS PDF BibTeX Usenix Large Installation Systems Administration Conference (LISA 18) Nov 2004  

Technical Reports:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Extending ACID Semantics to the File System via ptrace PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-06-04 May 2006 Ph.D. Thesis
2 File System Extensibility and Reliability Using an in-Kernel Database PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-04-06 Dec 2004 M.S. Thesis
3 Enhancing File System Integrity Through Checksums PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-04-04 May 2004  

Current Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Member Since
1 Rick Spillane PhD Jan 2008
2 Manjunath Chinni MS Jan 2008
3 Sachin Gaikwad MS Sep 2007

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Nikolai Joukov PhD Jan 2004 - Dec 2006 Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
2 Abhishek Rai PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2005 Member of the Technical Staff, Structured Data Access group, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
3 Gopalan Sivathanu PhD Sep 2003 - May 2008 Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure group, Google (Mountain View, CA)
4 Avishay Traeger PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2008 Research Staff Member, Storage Systems and Performance Management group, IBM Tel Aviv Research Lab (Tel-Aviv, Israel)
5 Charles P. Wright PhD May 2003 - May 2006 Research Staff Member, Network Server Systems Software group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
6 Jay Pradip Dave MS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET), Windows Security and Access Control team (WSAC), Windows Security group, Core Operating Systems Division (COSD), Microsoft (Seattle, WA)
7 Ramya Edara MS Jan 2007 - Dec 2007 Member of Technical staff (Developer), VFS group, engineering division, Riverbed (Sunnyvale, CA)
8 Aditya Kashyap MS Sep 2003 - Dec 2004 Senior Analyst, Fixed Income Research group, Lehman Brothers (New York, NY)
9 Harikesavan Pathangi Krishnan MS Jan 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Engineer, Engineering department for WAFS product line, Packeteer, Inc. (South Plainfield, NJ)
10 Devaki Kulkarni MS Sep 2003 - Dec 2004 Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Performance and Storage groups, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
11 Gopala Suryanarayana MS Sep 2006 - Dec 2007 Member of the Technical Staff, Virtual Infrastructure Management group, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
12 Mohammad Nayyer Zubair MS Jan 2004 - Dec 2004 Software Engineer, Falconstor (Melville, NY)
13 Rick Spillane BS/MS Jan 2005 - Dec 2007 Stony Brook U. CS Ph.D. program (Stony Brook, NY)
14 Mohammad Nayyer Zubair BS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Stony Brook U. CS M.S. program (Stony Brook, NY)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF CSR--PDOS $561,727 2006-2009 PI Support for Atomic Sequences of File System Operations
2 NSF Trusted Computing (TC) $400,000 2003-2006 Sole PI A Layered Approach to Securing Network File Systems


(Last updated: Thu Sep 11 16:25:36 EDT 2008)