Professional Linux Kernel Architecture

Chapter 8

The Virtual Filesystem

Typically, a full Linux system consists of somewhere between several thousand and a few million files that store programs, data, and all kinds of information. Hierarchical directory structures are used to catalog and group files together. Various approaches are adopted to permanently store the required structures and data.

Every operating system has at least one “standard filesystem” that features functions, some good, some less so, to carry out required tasks reliably and efficiently. The Second/Third Extended Filesystem that comes with Linux is a kind of standard filesystem that has proved itself to be very robust and suitable for everyday use over the past few years. Nevertheless, there are other filesystems written for or ported to Linux, all of which are acceptable alternatives to the Ext2 standard. Of course, this does not mean that programmers must apply different file access methods for each filesystem they use—this would run totally counter to the concept of an operating system as an abstraction mechanism.

To support various native filesystems and, at the same time, to allow access to files of other operating systems, the Linux kernel includes a layer between user processes (or the standard library) and the filesystem implementation. This layer is known as the Virtual File System, or VFS for short.1 Figure 8.1 shows the significance of the layer.

Figure 8.1 VFS layer for filesystem abstraction.

The task of VFS is not a simple one. On ...