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User‐level operating system transactions
Author(s) -
Spinellis Diomidis
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.935
Subject(s) - computer science , commit , operating system , database transaction , isolation (microbiology) , file system , compensating transaction , abort , snapshot (computer storage) , concurrency control , database , transaction processing system , transaction processing , microbiology and biotechnology , biology
User‐level operating system transactions allow system administrators and ordinary users to perform a sequence of file operations and then commit them as a group, or abort them without leaving any trace behind. Such a facility can aid many system administration and software development tasks. The snapshot isolation concurrency control mechanism allows transactions to be implemented without locking individual system calls; conflicts are detected when the transaction is ready to commit. Along these lines we have implemented a user‐space transaction monitor that is based on ZFS snapshots and a file system event monitor. Transactions are committed through a robust and efficient algorithm that merges the operations performed on a file system's clone back to its parent. Both the performance impact and the implementation cost of the transaction monitor we describe are fairly small. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.