Vnode stacking was first implemented by Rosenthal (in SunOS 4.1) around 1990[15]. A few other works followed Rosenthal, such as further prototypes for extensible file systems in SunOS[18], and the Ficus layered file system[4,7] at UCLA. Webber implemented file system interface extensions that allow user level file servers[20]. Unfortunately this work required modifications to existing file systems and could not perform as well as in-kernel file systems.
Several newer operating systems offer a stackable file system interface. They have the potential of easy development of file systems offering a wide range of services. Their main disadvantages are that they are not portable enough, not sufficiently developed or stable, or they are not available for common use. Also, new operating systems with new file system interfaces are not likely to perform as well as ones that are several years older.
The Herd of Unix-Replacing Daemons (HURD) from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a set of servers running on the Mach 3.0 microkernel[1] that collectively provide a Unix-like environment. HURD file systems run at user level. HURD introduced the concept of a translator, a program that can be attached to a pathname and perform specialized services when that pathname is accessed. Writing a new translator is a matter of implementing a well defined file access interface and filling in such operations as opening files, looking up file names, creating directories, etc.
Spring is an object-oriented research operating system built by Sun Microsystems Laboratories[10]. It was designed as a set of cooperating servers on top of a microkernel. Spring provides several generic modules which offer services useful for a file system: caching, coherency, I/O, memory mapping, object naming, and security. Writing a file system for Spring entails defining the operations to be applied on the objects. Operations not defined are inherited from their parent object. One work that resulted from Spring is the Solaris MC (Multi-Computer) File System[8]. It borrowed the object-oriented interfaces from Spring and integrated them with the existing Solaris vnode interface to provide a distributed file system infrastructure through a special Proxy File System. Solaris MC provides all of the benefits that come with Spring, while requiring little or no change to existing file systems; those can be gradually ported over time. Solaris MC was designed to perform well in a closely coupled cluster environment (not a general network) and requires high performance networks and nodes.