Tracing and Replaying File Systems

Capturing file system traces in a flexible and efficient manner is difficult. This project develops a thin layer stackable tracing file system. Tracefs can be configured dynamically to capture any number of file system events by file system operation, file name or extension, owner, group, process, time of day, etc. Traces can be summarized, anonymized, compressed, encryption, or passed through any other output transform. The traces that are captured are designed to be self-describing and efficient. User level utilities can provide additional processing on captured traces, including expansion or replaying the traces through the file system. Tracefs is useful beyond traditional file system studies. For example, Tracefs can be mounted on top of another file system in order to debug it or educate the user about the inner operation of file systems. In addition, hooks are available for feeding trace data into external modules such Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs).

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List Name Purpose Who Can Subscribe Who Can Post Comments
tracefs For users' questions, announcements, bug reports, and general. Anyone Subscribers only  

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Journal Articles:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 On Incremental File System Development PS PDF BibTeX ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) May 2006  

Conference and Workshop Papers:
# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Accurate and Efficient Replaying of File System Traces PS PDF BibTeX Fourth USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2005) Dec 2005  
2 Tracefs: A File System to Trace Them All PS PDF BibTeX Third USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2004) Apr 2004  

Technical Reports:
# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Versatile File System Tracing with Tracefs PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-04-05 Aug 2004 M.S. Thesis

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Nikolai Joukov PhD Jan 2004 - Dec 2006 Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
2 Charles P. Wright PhD May 2003 - May 2006 Partner, Senior Software Architect, Illumon (New York, NY)
3 Akshat Aranya MS May 2003 - Aug 2004 Software Development Engineer III, AWS Elemental, Elemental Technologies (Portland, OR)
4 Gopala Suryanarayana MS Sep 2006 - Dec 2007 Staff Engineer, Storage and Availability vSAN Group, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
5 Tim Wong BS Dec 2004 - Jun 2005 Associate, Volatility Arbitrage, Global Asset Allocation, Applied Quantitative Research (Greenwich, CT)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF HECURA $760,253 2006-2009 Lead-PI File System Tracing, Replaying, Profiling, and Analysis on HEC Systems
2 NSF Trusted Computing (TC) $400,000 2003-2006 Sole PI A Layered Approach to Securing Network File Systems