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?

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

You can convert your existing Ext3 filesystem to Ext4 with an easy procedure.Things to remember
* Unmount the filesystem before convert
* Filesystem must be non-root
This way you can improve the performance, storage limits and features of your existing filesystem without reformatting and/or reinstalling your OS and softwares.

There might be the situation, that your root filesystem runs out of space, so it has to be expanded. With filesystems other than the root filesystem this could easily be done for instance with gparted. With the root filesystem this is not possible, as gparted could only expand filesystems that are not mounted, which is impossible with the root filesystem.

Over time, a filesystem accumulates a lot of useless items. FSlint is a nifty little tool that helps you clean your filesystem by pointing out junk in the form of empty directories, corrupt symlinks, files with bad names, duplicate and temp files, and more.

Filesystem Types
* The most common filesystem types are:
ext2,ext3,ext4 The standard Linux filesystems

iso9660 The filesystem used on CD-ROMs

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a specially-designed database of files, their disk location, definition and attributes.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use.

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS and NFS. But, is there a perfect filesystem?