Assume that in a particular augmentation of a remote-file-access protocol, each client maintains a name cache that caches translations from file names to corresponding file handles. What issues should we take into account in implementing the name cache?

For a file system to be recoverable after a crash, it must be consistent or must be able to be made consistent. Therefore, we have to prove that logging metadata updates keeps the file system in a consistent or able-to-be-consistent state. For a file system to become inconsistent, the metadata must be written incompletely or in the wrong order to the file system data structures. With metadata logging, the writes are made to a sequential log. The complete transaction is written there before it is moved to the file system structures. If the system crashes during file system data updates, the updates can be completed based on the information in the log. Thus, logging ensures that file system changes are made completely (either before or after a crash).

The order of the changes is guaranteed to be correct because of the sequential writes to the log. If a change was made incompletely to the log, it is discarded, with no changes made to the file system structures.

Therefore, the structures are either consistent or can be trivially made consistent via metadata logging replay.