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Concept
CacheFS
Summary
CacheFS is the name used for several similar software technologies designed to speed up file access for networked computers. These technologies operate by storing (cached) copies of files on secondary memory, typically a local hard disk, so that if a file is accessed again, it can be done locally at much higher speeds than networks typically allow.
CacheFS software is used on several Unix-like operating systems. The original Unix version was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1993. Another version was written for Linux and released in 2003.
Network filesystems are dependent on a network link and a remote server; obtaining a file from such a can be significantly slower than getting the file locally. For this reason, it can be desirable to cache data from these filesystems on a local disk, thus potentially speeding up future accesses to that data by avoiding the need to go to the network and fetch it again. The software has to check that the remote file has not changed since it was cached, but this is much faster than reading the whole file again.
Sprite used large disk block caches. These were located in main-memory to achieve high performance in its file system. The term CacheFS has found little or no use to describe caches in main memory.
The first CacheFS implementation, in 6502 assembler, was a write through cache developed by Mathew R Mathews at Grossmont College. It was used from fall 1986 to spring 1990 on three diskless 64 kB main memory Apple IIe computers to cache files from a Nestar file server onto Big Board, a 1 MB DRAM secondary memory device partitioned into CacheFS and TmpFS. The computers ran Pineapple DOS, an Apple DOS 3.3 derivative developed in the course of a follow on to WR Bornhorst's NSF funded Instructional Computing System. Pineapple DOS features, including caching, were unnamed; the name CacheFS was introduced seven years later by Sun Microsystems.
The first Unix CacheFS implementation was developed by Sun Microsystems and released in the Solaris 2.
Official source
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