CPSC 508 Winter 2 2019: Quiz #2

45 points: 15 per question

This exam is closed notes, closed papers, closed interwebs, closed everything.

Please use whatever word processing software that you'd like to write your answers, but please send me an attachment with either plain text (≤ 80 characters per line) or PDF. I will be grading the quiz blind (that is, I don't want to know whose quiz I am grading), so please do not put your name anywhere in your exam. Instead, name the attachment lastname.{txt,pdf}. Please email your quiz to: mseltzer@cs.ubc.ca.

Here are the papers we've read since the first quiz:

  1. Waldspurger: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server
  2. Haggmann: Reimplementing the Cedar File System Using Logging and Group Commit
  3. Rosenblum: The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System
  4. Merkel: Docker: Lightweight Linux Containers for Consistent Development and Deployment
  5. Litton: Light-weight Contexts: An OS Abstraction for Safety and Performance
  6. Sandberg: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem
  7. Howard: Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System
  8. Anderson: Serverless Network File Systems
  9. Mickens: Blizzard: Fast, Cloud-scale Block Storage
  10. Schroeder: Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System
  11. Rinard: Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing

  1. State in Network File Systems

    2. Why did the designers of AFS and NFS arrive at different decisions with regard to state in network file systems.

  2. Logging? Journaling? Log-structured?

    3. What is the fundamental difference between a logging (or journaling) file system and a log-structured one? (Note: Please do not describe the particular systems we read about; I am looking for the fundamental general principle manner in which they differ.)

  3. Isolation Mechanisms

    4. In this batch of papers, we've talked about three different ways of providing isolation: virtual machines, containers, and lightweight contexts. For each mechanism, describe a use case for which the mechanism is particularly well-suited and for which neither of the other mechanisms would work.

Take-home quiz statement

At the end of the quiz, please write, "I have followed all the rules stated at the beginning of this quiz," if you have indeed followed all the rules.

Paper Survey

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