HERMES: File system support for multimedia streaming in information home appliance

Abstract

The HERMES file system is state-of-the-art file system designed to handle multimedia streaming workload in consumer electronics platform. The design objective of HERMES is to minimize the delay and the delay variance of I/O request in the sequential workload. File organization, meta data structure, unit of storage, or etc. are elaborately tailored to achieve this objective. Further, HERMES provides a number of API's specific to mpeg-4 file format. It can greatly facilitate the development of multimedia applications. For the seamless integration with the existing application, HERMES file system is developed under virtual file system(VFS) layer. Prototype of HERMES file system is implemented on Linux operating system. Our benchmark test shows that HERMES file system exhibits suprior performance than EXT2 file system.