FS-Cache & CacheFS: Caching for Network File Systems

“If you have read about FS-Cache or CacheFS you can easily get
confused by the terminology. FS-Cache is the interface between the
file system and the cache, allowing the file system to be cache
agnostic. CacheFS is the caching backend for FS-cache. CacheFS does
the actual handling of data storage and retrieval (i.e. the caching
mechanism) and uses a partition on a block device. There is also an
alternative caching mechanism called CacheFiles that uses a
directory in an existing file system. This architecture allows
alternative caching mechanisms to be used with FS-Cache. The first
implementation of CacheFS was developed by Sun in 1993 for the
Solaris 2.3 operating system. After that, other versions soon
appeared, notably for Irix in 1994.

“A number of years ago, some Linux kernel developers, notably
Dave Howells and Steve Dickson, began to develop FS-Cache and
CacheFS for Linux. In August 2004, Dave posted a set of patches to
the Linux kernel mailing list for CacheFS. FS-Cache patches have
been posted along with CacheFS. A good overview of CacheFS is an
article on lwn.net. With the 2.6.30 kernel, CacheFS is included and
is available for NFS and AFS.”

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