FS-Cache & CacheFS: Caching for Network File Systems

When *nix OS‚Äôs were developed, systems could be a bit on the slow side. Typical networks were either 10 Mb/s or, if you were lucky, 100 Mb/s. Accessing network based file systems such as NFS and AFS could be rather slow over these networks. In response to sometimes slow access, a local caching mechanism, called CacheFS, was developed to provide local caching for distributed file systems. This mechanism caches data (either complete files or parts of files) on local storage so that data can be possibly accessed from a local storage device instead of a network based file system…