The Way to Think

This lesson discusses two aspects to build a mental model of a file system.

We'll cover the following...

To think about file systems, we usually suggest thinking about two different aspects of them. If you understand both of these aspects, you probably understand how the file system basically works.

Data structures

The first is the data structures of the file system. In other words, what types of on-disk structures are utilized by the file system to organize its data and metadata? The first file systems we’ll see (including vsfs below) employ simple structures, ...