Summary: Life or Death at Block­Level
Muthian Sivathanu, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram,
Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin, Madison
{muthian, laksh, dusseau, remzi}@cs.wisc.edu
Abstract
A fundamental piece of information required in intelligent stor­
age systems is the liveness of data. We formalize the notion of
liveness within storage, and present two classes of techniques for
making storage systems liveness­aware. In the explicit notifica­
tion approach, we present robust techniques by which a file sys­
tem can impart liveness information to storage through a ``free
block'' command. In the implicit detection approach, we show
that such information can be inferred by the storage system ef­
ficiently underneath a range of file systems, without changes to
the storage interface. We demonstrate our techniques through
a prototype implementation of a secure deleting disk. We find
that while the explicit interface approach is desirable due to its
simplicity, the implicit approach is easy to deploy and enables

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences