UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation

The SVR4 VFS/Vnode Architecture

System V Release 4 was the result of a merge between SVR3 and Sun Microsystems' SunOS. One of the goals of both Sun and AT&T was to merge the Sun VFS/vnode interface with AT&T's File System Switch.

The new VFS architecture, which has remained largely unchanged for over 15 years, introduced and brought together a number of new ideas, and provided a clean separation between different subsystems in the kernel. One of the fundamental changes was eliminating the tight coupling between the filesystem and the VM subsystem which, although elegant in design, was particularly complicated resulting in a great deal of difficulty when implementing new filesystem types.

Changes to File Descriptor Management

A file descriptor had previously been an index into the u_ofile[] array. Because this array was of fixed size, the number of files that a process could have open was bound by the size of the array. Because most processes do not open a lot of files, simply increasing the size of the array is a waste of space, given the large number of processes that may be present on the system.

With the introduction of SVR4, file descriptors were allocated dynamically up to a fixed but tunable limit. The u_ofile[] array was removed and replaced by two new fields, u_nofiles, which specified the number of file descriptors that the process can currently access, and u_flist, a structure of type ufchunk that contains an array of NFPCHUNK (which is 24) pointers to file table entries. ...