User-level operating system transactions allow system administrators
and ordinary users to perform a sequence of file
operations and then
commit them as a group, or abort them without leaving any
trace behind.
Such a facility can aid many system administration and software
development tasks.
The snapshot isolation concurrency control mechanism allows transactions
to be implemented without locking individual system calls;
conflicts are detected when the transaction is ready to commit.
Along these lines we have implemented a user-space transaction monitor
that is based on ZFS snapshots and a file system event monitor.
Transactions are committed through a robust and efficient algorithm
that merges the operations performed on a file system's
clone back to its parent.
Both the performance impact and the implementation cost of the transaction
monitor we describe are fairly small.
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