Providing Context-Awareness To Virtual File System

In ubiquitous environment, adaptive applications require the context-aware data access. This paper proposes a backward-compatible, context-aware virtual file system (CaVFS). Users can find a file by the context without remembering full path. Since CaVFS supports the full backward compatibility, users can even browse hierarchically with the legacy path name, and the legacy applications can access the files in a context-aware way. We implement CaVFS in Linux kernel 2.6.7-21. The experiments show that the overhead to maintain the context is reasonably small.