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Filesystem extension

The third example is a filesystem extension that allows applications to transparently access remote files. Requests corresponding to remote filesystems are redirected to a server running elsewhere. The extension should provide wrappers for filesystem services, analyze the arguments and then choose which underlying service should be invoked to complete the request.

Usually, dynamically-linked programs do not trap directly to the operating system for reading and writing. Traps are usually encapsulated in a system library (e.g. libc) and are exported as library functions. Therefore, DITOOLS can interpose the above routines to these functions to achieve the expected behavior, without the need of system-call redirection functionality.

int fs_write(int fd, char *b, int s)
{
  if remote_fd(fd) { 
    a = marshal(b,s);
    r = send_request(server, WRITE, a);
  } else 
    r = base_fs_write(fd,b,s);
  return r;
}



Albert Serra, DITools, 2000 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Tue Apr 25 13:07:07 MET DST 2000