Design and Implementation of WFS - A Web File System For Linux 2.2.1

WFS is a new Linux filesystem which provides a filesystem like interface for the World Wide Web. It was developed as a kernel module for the Linux Kernel 2.2.1, and utilizes a user level process (web daemon) to service HTTP document fetch requests. The filesystem provides for caching of remote documents and can process multiple outstanding requests concurrently. As remote documents are fetched, content contained in hyperlinks within those documents is extracted and mapped into the local filesystem. This remote directory content information is maintained for each directory managed by WFS in a special file ‘...’. The utility lsw is used to list and manage the remote directory content. The partition managed by WFS is a read-only partition for WFS clients. However, clients are able to flush entries from the WFS partition using a special utility rwm. Our performance study shows that WFS is about 30% slower than AFS for file access traces composed of 100% cache misses. The lower WFS performance is probably due in part to the larger amount of processing pushed to the user level process in WFS, and the use of a general HTTP library for document fetches.