Summary

The introduction of FFS was a watershed moment in file system history, as it made clear that the problem of file management was one of the most interesting issues within an operating system. It showed how one might begin to deal with that most important of devices, the hard disk. Since that time, hundreds of new file systems have developed, but still today many file systems take cues from FFS (e.g., Linux ext2 and ext3 are obvious intellectual descendants). Certainly, all modern systems account for the main lesson of FFS: treat the disk like it’s a disk.