How Linux Works, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Disks and Filesystems

In Chapter 3, we discussed some of the top-level disk devices that the kernel makes available. In this chapter, we’ll discuss in detail how to work with disks on a Linux system. You’ll learn how to partition disks, create and maintain the filesystems that go inside disk partitions, and work with swap space.

Recall that disk devices have names like /dev/sda, the first SCSI subsystem disk. This kind of block device represents the entire disk, but there are many different components and layers inside a disk.

Figure 4-1 illustrates the schematic of a typical Linux disk (note that the figure is not to scale). As you progress ...