6. The Filesystem
Quick: which of the following would you expect to find in a “filesystem”?
• Processes
• Audio devices
• Kernel data structures and tuning parameters
• Interprocess communication channels
If the system is UNIX or Linux, the answer is “all of the above, and more!” And yes, you might find some files in there, too.1
The basic purpose of a filesystem is to represent and organize the system’s storage resources, but programmers have been eager to avoid reinventing the wheel when it comes to managing other types of objects. It has often proved convenient to map these objects into the filesystem namespace. This unification has some advantages ...
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