BuffetFS: Serve Yourself Permission Checks without Remote Procedure Calls

The remote procedure call (a.k.a. RPC) latency becomes increasingly significant in a distributed file system. We propose BuffetFS, a user-level file system that optimizes I/O performance by eliminating the RPCs caused by open() operation. By leveraging open() from file servers to clients, BuffetFS can restrain the procedure calls for permission checks locally, hence avoid RPCs during the initial stage to access a file. BuffetFS can further reduce response time when users are accessing a large number of small files. We implement a BuffetFS prototype and integrate it into a storage cluster. Our preliminary evaluation results show that BuffetFS can offer up to 70% performance gain compared to the Lustre file system.