Operating system support for object dependencies in persistent object stores

Abstract

Persistent object stores provide uniform management of short-term and long-term objects. Such stores ensure the integrity of the data even after occurrence of a failure, by guaranteeing the existence of some previous self-consistent stable state at each point in time. Maintaining a consistent state of a persistent store necessitates recording of inter-object dependencies and checkpointing of each object together with all its dependent objects. Directed graphs may be used to describe such dependencies. We describe eager and lazy construction of dependency graphs. We then address operating system and hardware support for management of dependencies.