Marshall Kirk McKusick
Michael J. Karels
Keith Bostic
Computer Systems Research Group
Computer Science Division
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720
email: mckusick@cs.Berkeley.EDU
telephone: 415-642-4948
This paper describes the motivations for memory-based filesystems. It compares techniques used to implement them and describes the drawbacks of using dedicated memory to support such filesystems. To avoid the drawbacks of using dedicated memory, it discusses building a simple memory-based filesystem in pageable memory. It details the performance characteristics of this filesystem and concludes with areas for future work.