Efficient, robust file handle invalidation

Details Efficient, robust file handle invalidation Efficient, robust file handle invalidation

2006-10-03

2006-10-03

Nguyen, T (Department: 2187)

Electrical computers and digital processing systems: memory

Storage accessing and control

Specific memory composition

C711S114000

Reexamination Certificate

active

07117303

ABSTRACT:
The present invention provides a technique for efficiently generating and validating external file handles at a storage operating system of a filer. According to one aspect of the technique, the storage operating system associates a unique internal file handle with each file or directory stored in the filer. This unique internal file handle is used to generate a corresponding external file handle. Unlike previous approaches, the internal file handles' representations do not change depending on the location of their corresponding files or directories, e.g., on-disk or in-core, within the filer, thereby simplifying file management within the filer. According to another aspect of the inventive technique, the filer executes a file-handle validation procedure to determine whether an external file handle received with a file access request has become invalid (or “stale”) as a result of an NVRAM failure in the filer. The file-handle validation procedure enables the filer to efficiently determine the validity of the external file handle without having to perform conventional time-consuming and processing-intensive operations. Advantageously, the inventive technique is preferably only applied to generation and validation of external file handles configured in accordance with a stateless file-system protocol, such as the NFS protocol. In this way, there is no overhead added to the filer's storage operating system for generating and validating external file handles configured in accordance with stateful file-system protocols.

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