UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation

Introduction

Welcome to UNIX Filesystems—Evolution, Design, and Implementation, the first book that is solely dedicated to UNIX internals from a filesystem perspective.

Much has been written about the different UNIX and UNIX-like kernels since Maurice Bach's book The Design of the UNIX Operating System [BACH86] first appeared in 1986. At that time, he documented the internals of System V Release 2 (SVR2). However, much had already happened in the UNIX world when SVR2 appeared. The earliest documented kernel was 6th Edition as described in John Lions' work Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition—with Source Code [LION96], which was an underground work until its publication in 1996. In addition to these two books, there have also been a number of others that have described the different UNIX kernel versions.

When writing about operating system internals, there are many different topics to cover from process management to virtual memory management, from device drivers to networking, and hardware management to filesystems. One could fill a book on each of these areas and, in the case of networking and device drivers, specialized books have in fact appeared over the last decade.

Filesystems are a subject of great interest to many although they have typically been poorly documented. This is where this book comes into play.

This book covers the history of UNIX describing how filesystems were implemented in the early research editions of UNIX up to today's highly scalable enterprise class ...