Employing intelligence in object-based storage devices to provide attribute-based file access

Attribute-based file access has been regarded as a promising method to reach files based on their attributes rather than through the usual directory hierarchy,which is especially meaningful for locating the target among mass of files.However,because the attribute-based file system introduces higher performance overhead and is usually incompatible with existing file access interfaces,till now there are few practical attribute-based file systems.This paper designs a file system with attribute-based access methods and a compatible access interface,using object-based storage devices(OSD).In detail,this design fully utilizes existing features of the OSD standard(T10):object attributes and access methods are mapped into file attributes and the corresponding access interfaces respectively;collection-objects are used for fast indexing of user objects.Therefore,the attribute-based object organization can be achieved in OSD efficiently and the powerful processing capability of OSD is used to complete object-queries to speed up the performance.Moreover,the way to export the new accessing methods through file system with a compatible interface is also presented.Such a prototype has been implemented.Tests show that it introduces much less overheads than some existing attribute-based file systems,and the query performance is higher than its counterpart based on the block-level device.