In Linux kernel, the virtual file systems lies on top of concrete file systems and device files, to provide a uniform interface to access those lying below it.
Do distributed file systems lie below or above the virtual file system in each computer?
Are distributed file systems implemented in the level of OS kernels, or as software above the OS kernel?
How does the big picture of the layers look like?
Thanks.
Reg: Virtual file system
The virtual file system is an abstraction layer for multiple file system's support. The VFS provides template wherein file system developers needs to fill in the supported operations of a file system.
Do distributed file systems lie below or above the virtual file system in each computer?
It depends on the file system implementation.
(A) It could be below VFS (a.k.a kernel file system) which uses the OS internals and having distributed file system features. It again could be of 2 types
(1) Built on existing on-disk file systems (here called proxy file systems)
(2) Could be real on-disk distributed file system.
(B) It could be above VFS and OS completely (a.k.a user file system) by using the user level API interfaces of file system OR FUSE.
