Reading a File from Disk: A Recap

To make sure you understand how LFS works, let us now walk through what must happen to read a file from disk. Assume we have nothing in memory to begin. The first on-disk data structure we must read is the checkpoint region.

The checkpoint region contains pointers (i.e., disk addresses) to the entire inode map, and thus LFS then reads in the entire inode map and caches it in memory. After this point, when given an inode number of a file, LFS simply looks up the inode-number to inode-disk-address mapping in the imap, and reads in the most recent version of the inode. To read a block from the file, at this point, LFS proceeds exactly like a typical UNIX file system, by using direct pointers or indirect pointers or doubly-indirect pointers as need be. In the common case, LFS should perform the same number of I/Os as a typical file system when reading a file from the disk; the entire imap is cached and thus the extra work LFS does during a read is to look up the inode’s address in the imap.