CoW Link: Duplicated data block management scheme for multi-user consumer electronics devices

In consumer electronics (CE) environments, as the needs for multiple user account grow, operating system for CE devices began to support multi-user features. Unfortunately, with this feature, the system installs software packages individually for each account, and it would waste the storage space of CE devices. In this paper, we propose a scheme, called Copy-on-Write (CoW) Link, that efficiently saves the storage space by eliminating duplicate blocks of the files belonging to software packages. Our evaluation results show that CoW Link reduces the storage space by up to 9 times, compared with the traditional scheme.