Paper Info
Title
OXenstored: an efficient hierarchical and transactional database using functional programming with reference cell comparisons
Abstract
We describe in this paper our implementation of the Xenstored service which is part of the Xen architecture. Xenstored maintains a hierarchical and transactional database, used for storing and managing configuration values. We demonstrate in this paper that mixing functional data-structures together with reference cell comparison, which is a limited form of pointer comparison, is: (i) safe; and (ii) efficient. This demonstration is based, first, on an axiomatization of operations on the tree-like structure we used to represent the Xenstored database. From this axiomatization, we then derive an efficient algorithm for coalescing concurrent transactions modifying that structure. Finally, we experimentally compare the performance of our implementation, that we called OXenstored, and the C implementation of the Xenstored service distributed with the Xen hypervisor sources: the results show that Oxenstored is much more efficient than its C counterpart. As a direct result of this work, OXenstored will be included in future releases of Xenserver, the virtualization product distributed by Citrix Systems, where it will replace the current implementation of the Xenstored service.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1596550.1596581
Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Keywords
Field
DocType
concurrency,databases,functional programming,product distribution
Virtualization,Transaction processing,Data structure,Pointer (computer programming),Programming language,Functional programming,Computer science,Concurrency,Parallel computing,Hypervisor,Database transaction,Distributed computing
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
44
9
0362-1340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.83
11
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Thomas Gazagnaire121513.32
Vincent Hanquez2100.83