Title: wFIFO - a Filesystem-Based Solution to Unrestricted Log Growth in MINIX
Author: Jeffrey Absher
Abstract:

In Unix environments, application logs often quickly grow unexpectedly large. This paper reviews various available solutions that attempt to manage that growth and proposes an elemental addition to filesystems that assists in managing unexpected growth. Additionally, a prototype of the filesystem element for MINIX is developed and development notes are presented. The filesystem element is a new type of file which grows to a specific size and then upon a block allocation beyond that threshold, it deletes the first block of the file. When this filetype is appended, it acts as a finite-length FIFO queue that has elements consumed when it is written to.

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