January 2004
Intermediate to advanced
432 pages
11h 1m
English
The kernel must maintain a complete list of all opened files on the system, active mount points, and what is mounted there. Performance requires that many file system structures be maintained in core-resident inode caches and buffer caches as well as in a variety of tables.
Each discrete, open system call results in an entry to the system file table (see Figure 3-13). If the same file is opened 20 times, there will be 20 separate entries in the table. Discrete entries are required because this table keeps track of the type of open (read or write), the current offset into the file, and the number of linkages to it. As the various processes are terminated, their file descriptors are closed, and ...
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