The LFS takes advantage of the known hierarchical reference patterns amongst the blocks of the file system during logging and recovery; the
inode map, segment summary blocks and segment usage array data structures describe the file system's structure and play an important role in the LFS's management of disk space.
The client sends the request with a log ID and client ID; after the transaction involving the metadata request, the MDS reads the stamp field of the associated
inode (a data structure in the file systems that stores all the information about the file system objects, such as file and directory, but without data and name) and sends it along with the metadata response to the client; finally, it puts the client ID and log ID into the stamp field of the corresponding
inode to indicate the last metadata request related to the
inode and updates Active Request List with the current metadata request including the sequential number generated by the MDS (i.e., the corresponding transaction number) and the relevant stamp.