List of file systems

The following lists identify, characterize and link to more thorough information on computer file systems.

Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system itself.

Contents

Disk file systems

Disk file systems are usually block-oriented. Files in a block-oriented file system are sequences of blocks, often featuring fully random-access read, write, and modify operations.

File systems with built-in fault-tolerance

These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices.

File systems optimized for flash memory, solid state media

Main article: Flash file system

Solid state media, like flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. While practically eliminating seek times, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms.

Record-oriented file systems

In record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.

Shared disk file systems

Shared disk file systems (also called shared storage file systems, SAN file system, Clustered file system or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.

Shared disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers. Parallel filesystem - file systems with support for parallel applications, all nodes may be accessing the same files at the same time, concurrently reading and writing. Data for a single file is striped across multiple storage nodes to provide scalable performance to individual files. Examples of this include: Panasas ActiveScale, Lustre, GPFS and Sistina. NFSv4.1 will feature an extension to the NFS standard that supports parallel IO.

Distributed file systems

Distributed file systems are also called network file systems. Many implementations have been made, they are location dependent and they have access control lists (ACLs), unless otherwise stated below.

Distributed fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed fault-tolerant replication of data between nodes (between servers or servers/clients) for high availability and offline (disconnected) operation.

Distributed parallel file systems

Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).

Some of the distributed parallel file systems use object storage device (OSD) (In Lustre called OST) for chunks of data together with centralized metadata servers.

Distributed parallel fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed file systems, which also are parallel and fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters.

All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.

In development:

Peer-to-peer file systems

Special purpose file systems

Pseudo- and virtual file systems

Encrypted file systems

Files system interfaces

These are not really file systems; they allow access to file systems from an operating system standpoint.

See also

References

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  18. ^ http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/techref/flash.layout

External links