The filesystem used in the vast majority of Linux (and to a lesser extent on other Unix) distributions is the ext3 filesystem, which stands for extended filesystem. Slashdot recently pointed to an article on IBM DeveloperWorks discussing the new ext4 filesystem currently in development, and some of its new features. So what is a filesystem really?

Over the weekend, I converted my laptop to use the ext4 filesystem. So far so good! So far I’ve found one bug as a result of my using ext4 in production (if delayed allocation is enabled, i_blocks doesn’t get updated until the block allocation takes place, so files can appear to have 0k blocksize right after they are created, which is confusing/unfortunate), but nothing super serious yet.

When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems.

You've probably heard of Journaling Flash File System (JFFS) and Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS), but do you know what it means to have a file system that assumes an underlying flash device?

In recent history, journaling file systems were viewed as an oddity and thought of primarily in terms of research. But today, a journaling file system (ext3) is the default in Linux®. Discover the ideas behind journaling file systems, and learn how they provide better integrity in the face of a power failure or system crash. Learn about the various journaling file systems in use today, and peek into the next generation of journaling file systems.

I was intrigued when a colleague sent me a link to an article by Henry Newman referring to a “firestorm” touched off by some remarks he recently made in another article he wrote. The first article addressed the scalability of standalone Linux file systems vs. standalone symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) file systems such as IBM’s GPFS or Sun’s ZFS.

Most probably you have heard many, many times the three words, virtual file system, but what exactly do they mean? In my recent article What does this /proc directory do?

A new Linux filesystem gets rid of the 256-petabyte limit, and adds a checksum feature for the journal. But developers want you to know that it's not yet ready for production sytems.

If there's one thing that drives me nuts about the current operating system models is that there is no one single file system that works across all operating systems, fills all the needs of everyone out there and is stable beyond mention to boot. (no pun intended) For Linux there is no less than 30 different file systems.