Product Code Database
AdvFS, also known as Tru64 UNIX Advanced File System, is a file system developed in the late 1980s to mid-1990s by Digital Equipment Corporation for their OSF/1 version of the Unix operating system (later Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX). In June 2008, it was released as free software under the GPL-2.0-only license. Press release concerning the release of the AdvFS source code AdvFS has been used in high-availability systems where fast recovery from downtime is essential.
File sets can be balanced, meaning that file content of file sets be balanced across physical volumes. Particular files in a file set can be striped across available volumes.
Administrators can take a snapshot (or clone) of any active or inactive file set. This allows for easy on-line backups and editing.
Another feature allows administrators to add or remove block devices from a file domain, while the file domain has active users. This add/remove feature allows migration to larger devices or migration from potentially failing hardware without a system shutdown.
Under Linux, AdvFS supports an additional ‘’syncv’’ system call to atomically commit changes to multiple files.Verma, Rajat, et al. "Failure-atomic updates of application data in a Linux file system.” 13th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 15). 2015. online version
It was first delivered on the DEC OSF/1 system (later Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX). Over time, development moved to teams located in Bellevue, WA and Nashua, NH. Versions were always one version number behind the operating system version. Thus, DEC OSF/1 v3.2 had AdvFS v2.x, Digital UNIX 4.0 had AdvFS v3.x and Tru64 UNIX 5.x had AdvFS v4.x. It is generally considered that only AdvFS v4 had matured to production level stability, with a sufficient set of tools to get administrators out of any kind of trouble. The original team had enough confidence in its log based recovery to release it without an "fsck" style recovery utility on the assumption that the file system journal would always be allocated on mirrored drives.
In 1996, Lee and ThekkathLee, Edward K., and Chandramohan A. Thekkath. "Petal: Distributed virtual disks." ACM SIGPLAN Notices. Vol. 31. No. 9. ACM, 1996. Available online described the use of AdvFS on top of a novel disk virtualisation layer known as Petal. In a later paper,Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Timothy Mann, and Edward K. Lee. 1997. Frangipani: a scalable distributed file system. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 31, 5 (October 1997), 224-237. Also in: Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Timothy Mann, and Edward K. Lee. 1997. Frangipani: a scalable distributed file system. In Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP '97), William M. Waite (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 224-237. Online version Thekkath et al. describe their own file system ( Frangipani) built on top of Petal and compare it to the performance of AdvFS running on the same storage layer.
Shapiro and MillerShapiro, Michael, and Ethan Miller. "Managing databases with binary large objects." Mass Storage Systems, 1999. 16th IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 1999. Available online compared the performance of files stored in AdvFS to Oracle RDBMS version 7.3.4 BLOB storage.
Compaq Sierra Parallel File System (PFS) created a cluster file system based on multiple local AdvFS filesystems; testing carried out at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2000–2001 found that while the underlying AdvFS filesystem had adequate performance (albeit with high CPU utilisation), the PFS clustering layer on top of it performed poorly.Uselton, A C. The Performance of PFS, the Compaq Sierra Product’s Parallel File System. United States: N. p., 2001. Web. doi:10.2172/15006183. Available online
On June 23, 2008, its source code was released by Hewlett-Packard under the GPL-2.0-only license (instead of the recently released GPLv3) at SourceForge in order to be compatible with the also GPL-2.0-only licensed Linux kernel.
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