[Nottingham] [Talk] Thurs 02/07/09 What's in a Filesystem?

[Martin]

Joshua,

> Sounds like a good talk, shame it's a bit far for me to make it.
> Filesystems are a recent interest of mine so I'll look forward to the
> mailing list discussions!

Should be, and also good depending on what gets stirred.

As a prequel...

The bits leading to this talk all started with my stumbling across a 
certain rant from Linus:

(WARNING! NOT for the faint hearted!)

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=95823&threadid=92678&roomid=2

and also a later argument about filesystem extended attributes:

http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=95832&threadid=92678&roomid=2

... which niggled some of my old concerns with some of the bits 'n' 
pieces going into the alternate "namespaces" for ReiserFS 4. (I'm a 
ReiserFS 3.6 fan.) OK, all very esoteric but fundamental to how we 
[i]use[/i] such essential stuff. BTW: That's not in the talk or we'd be 
a three week convention!

There's also good fun with:

(Linus SSD Rant)
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=93409&threadid=92678&roomid=2

(Linus SSD explanation)
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=95307&threadid=92678&roomid=2

and very good comments there are in there too.

If we carry on to go (spinning) diskless, I may mention:

(HDD & SSD data alignments)
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/


Not to be too scary!...

The main intention is just to give an idea of what it is that a 
filesystem does and the filesystems that are easily available to do it. 
Anyone heard of ext3 or FAT32?... As to how much "how" depends on 
interest and how much beer flows ;-)


Aside for those that might understand (oooer! :-) )

I have xattr support turned *OFF*


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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