5

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 the above, and more!” And yes, you might find some files in there, too. (It’s perhaps more accurate to say that these entities are represented within the filesystem. In most cases, the filesystem is used as a rendezvous point to connect clients with the drivers they are seeking.)

The basic purpose of a filesystem is to represent and organize the system’s storage resources. However, ...

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