Overall Organization

In this lesson, we discuss the overall organization and layout of a file system.

We now develop the overall on-disk organization of the data structures of the vsfs file system.

Blocks

The first thing we’ll need to do is divide the disk into blocks. Simple file systems use just one block size, and that’s exactly what we’ll do here. Let’s choose a commonly-used size of 4 KB.

Thus, our view of the disk partition where we’re building our file system is simple: a series of blocks, each of size 4 KB. The blocks are addressed from 0 to N − 1, in a partition of size N 4-KB blocks. Assume we have a really small disk, with just 64 blocks:

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