Lecture

File Systems

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Description

This lecture covers the fundamentals of file systems, focusing on managing persistent blocks efficiently, organizing files and metadata, and implementing file system APIs. It explains the general IO abstraction stack, file system abstraction, file naming, inodes, and file descriptors. The lecture also delves into the structure of directories, hard and symbolic links, and operations on files. Additionally, it discusses the implementation of file systems, file allocation methods like contiguous, linked blocks, file allocation table (FAT), and multi-level indexing. The lecture concludes with insights into the file system layout, superblock, and file allocation strategies.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Computer engineering

Computer data storage: File systems, Topics in computer data storage

Related concepts (30)

File system

In computing, a file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified.

File system fragmentation

In computing, file system fragmentation, sometimes called file system aging, is the tendency of a to lay out the contents of non-continuously to allow in-place modification of their contents. It is a special case of data fragmentation. File system fragmentation negatively impacts seek time in spinning storage media, which is known to hinder throughput. Fragmentation can be remedied by re-organizing files and free space back into contiguous areas, a process called defragmentation.

Virtual file system

A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete . The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS can, for example, be used to access local and network storage devices transparently without the client application noticing the difference. It can be used to bridge the differences in Windows, classic Mac OS/macOS and Unix filesystems, so that applications can access files on local file systems of those types without having to know what type of file system they are accessing.

File Allocation Table

File Allocation Table (FAT) is a developed for personal computers and was the default filesystem for MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. The increase in disk drives capacity required three major variants: FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32. FAT was replaced with NTFS as the default file system on Microsoft operating systems starting with Windows XP.

File format

A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a . It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata.

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