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Special Forums Hardware Filesystems, Disks and Memory What filesystem does unix use? Post 24128 by Perderabo on Friday 5th of July 2002 01:20:45 PM
Old 07-05-2002
Unix is not a monolithic system controlled by a single entity. So this is harder question than you may think.

The original filesystem for unix is one that was designed by Ken Thompson back in the 1960's. One one his reason to write unix was to try out his filesystem. It didn't really have a name that I know of. While it was very cool for its time, it was pretty much abandoned by 1980. It had some serious problems. I doubt that anyone would want to use when alternatives became available.

The next major filesystem was designed by Kirk Mckusick. It is very good and it is still with us today. HP-UX calls it "hfs" for high-performance filesystem. SunOS calls it ufs. I don't know what the u stands for. But even though both OS's use this filesystem, you can't umount a disk from HP-UX and carry it to a SunOS box and mount it. There are enough differences that this won't work.

Both SunOS and HP-UX have other filesystem types built-in. Both are moving to the new Veritas filesystem and both call it vxfs. But again, you can't cross-mount a physical disk. Both OS's also have support for cd-rom type filesystems. And they both support NFS which let's you open a file on a remote system.

At this point, Unix has special features in the OS that allow easy installation of new filesystems. It is almost as easy as installing a device driver. Writing a decent filesyetm is harder than writing a decent driver, so there aren't lots of choices. But are several odd filesystems that float in from time to time. HP-UX invented its own which it called SDF, for "Structured Directory Format"...it didn't last. I have also heard of AFS (Andrew Filesystem), JFS (Journeled Filesystem), and few others that I recall just this minute.

So it's not easy to give you a definative answer.
 

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UMOUNT(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 						 UMOUNT(8)

NAME
umount -- unmount filesystems SYNOPSIS
umount [-fv] special | node umount -a | -A [-fv] [-h host] [-t type] DESCRIPTION
The umount command calls the unmount(2) system call to remove a special device or the remote node (rhost:path) from the filesystem tree at the point node. If either special or node are not provided, the appropriate information is taken from the list of filesystems provided by getfsent(3). The options are as follows: -a All the filesystems described via getfsent(3) are unmounted. -A All the currently mounted filesystems except the root are unmounted. -f The filesystem is forcibly unmounted. Active special devices continue to work, but all other files return errors if further accesses are attempted. The root filesystem cannot be forcibly unmounted. -h host Only filesystems mounted from the specified host will be unmounted. This option implies the -A option and, unless otherwise speci- fied with the -t option, will only unmount NFS filesystems. -t type Is used to indicate the actions should only be taken on filesystems of the specified type. More than one type may be specified in a comma separated list. The list of filesystem types can be prefixed with ``no'' to specify the filesystem types for which action should not be taken. For example, the umount command: umount -a -t nfs,hfs umounts all filesystems of the type NFS and HFS. -v Verbose, additional information is printed out as each filesystem is unmounted. NOTES
Due to the complex and interwoven nature of Mac OS X, umount may fail often. It is recommended that diskutil(1) (as in, ``diskutil unmount /mnt'') be used instead. SEE ALSO
unmount(2), getfsent(3), mount(8), diskutil(1) HISTORY
A umount command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. 4th Berkeley Distribution May 8, 1995 4th Berkeley Distribution
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