The Ufo Project Homepage

Parallel Systems Lab
Computer Science Department
University of California
Santa Barbara

Current Project Members

Prof. Klaus Schauser
Prof. Chris Scheiman
Max Ibel
Albert Alexandrov

What is Ufo

Ufo is a global file system. It allows users to treat remote files exactly as if they were local. Currently, Ufo supports file access through the FTP and HTTP protocols and allows new protocols to be plugged in. Ufo is implemented entirely at the user level using the Catcher. The Catcher is our tool for extending the functionality of standard UNIX operating systems completely at the user level. It works by intercepting selected system calls at the user level, using the existing /proc interface. The behavior of some intercepted system calls is then modified to implement new functionality. This approach does not require any re-linking or re-compilation of existing applications. In fact, the extensions can even be dynamically ``installed'' into already running processes.

Publications

Extending the Operating System at the User Level: the Ufo Global File System
Albert Alexandrov, Maximilian Ibel, Klaus E. Schauser, and Chris Scheiman,
To appear in USENIX'97

[ postscript paper ]

Availability

Download the beta release for Solaris 2.5 here.

The source code is available upon request from berto@cs.ucsb.edu.