[CVALE] How do you design a file system?

[Patrick Bennett]

Isn't reiserfs an open source project? ext3 definitely is. You might be 
able to answer a lot of these questions simply by looking at their 
project websites and/or source code.

-Patrick


Landon Blake wrote:
>
> Its time for one of my really ignorant and purely theoretical 
> questions: How do you design a computer file system?
>
> Some common file systems are FAT16, FAT32, Ext2, and Ext3. I know they 
> all do basically the same thing, store files on some sort of storage 
> medium.
>
> If you wanted to design a new file system, how would you go about it? 
> Would it have to be written specifically for each processor type? 
> Could it be written in a programming language like C, or would it have 
> to be implemented at a lower level by using some sort of assembly 
> language? Is a file system simply a format specification? (For 
> example, the name of the file goes in this 50 bytes, the length of the 
> file in the next 10 bytes…) Or does a file system contain tools, 
> utilities and functions?
>
> How would one add support for a new file system to Linux? Could you do 
> this with what is called a kernel “module”?
>
> I’m not saying I’d actually want to implement a new file system, since 
> there is already a lot of existing file systems that work just fine, 
> but I’m curious as to how this would work.
>
> What is on the cutting edge of computer file system design? What new 
> concepts are they exploring?
>
> Landon
>
>
>
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