Leisure pace of progress

[nikitadanilov]

Recently I found a paper in ACM Library describing two distributed file systems with the following features:

• distributed read-write locking at the byte granularity;
• user visible distributed transactions with isolation and roll-back;
• capability based authentication;
• files implemented as B-trees;
• distributed garbage collection of unreferenced objects;
• atomicity through COW (aka shadow writes, aka wandering logs);
• intent logging of file system updates (hello, ZFS);
• storage failure resilience methods, similar to ones in TileFS;
• directories implemented as separate service, using the same interface as usual clients.

Quite impressive and obviously matched by nothing publicly available currently. How it happened that these marvels are not trumpeted about on every corner? Very simple: these systems were put in production before 1981. AD, that is. Funny enough, one of them is even named CFS.

[0] James G. Mitchell, Jeremy Dion A comparison of two network-based file servers

[1] Jeremy Dion The Cambridge File Server