System Architecture

The fakefs system consists of:

• A database that physically contains the filesystem, discussed in detail in chapter 7.

• A daemon (or daemons?) which takes care of database administrative functions, environment setup, deferred file cache operations, and garbage collection.

• A C library which provides POSIX-style file manipulation primitives (e.g. fakefs_open, see chapter 5).

• A .h file which can be #included into C programs, which re#defines standard POSIX calls to use fakefs functions.

• A LD_PRELOAD shared library which replaces the standard POSIX open(), stat, chmod library functions with fakefs equivalents. This library is discussed in chapter 14.

• A collection of dynamically loadable extensions (`plugins') which implement various compression and decompression schemes. These are discussed in detail in chapter 9.

• An NFS server (because no filesystem without an NFS service is worth discussion).