What filesystem does unix use? Post: 24128

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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

07-05-2002

Administrator Emeritus

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.

Perderabo

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

mkfs.minix

MKFS.MINIX(8)						       System Administration						     MKFS.MINIX(8)

NAME

       mkfs.minix - make a Minix filesystem

SYNOPSIS

       mkfs.minix [-c|-l filename] [-n namelength] [-i inodecount] [-v] device [size-in-blocks]

DESCRIPTION

       mkfs.minix creates a Linux MINIX filesystem on a device (usually a disk partition).

       The device is usually of the following form:

	      /dev/hda[1-8] (IDE disk 1)
	      /dev/hdb[1-8] (IDE disk 2)
	      /dev/sda[1-8] (SCSI disk 1)
	      /dev/sdb[1-8] (SCSI disk 2)

       The  size-in-blocks parameter is the desired size of the file system, in blocks.  It is present only for backwards compatibility.  If omit-
       ted the size will be determined automatically.  Only block counts strictly greater than 10 and strictly less than 65536 are allowed.

OPTIONS

       -c     Check the device for bad blocks before creating the filesystem.  If any are found, the count is printed.

       -n namelength
	      Specify the maximum length of filenames.	Currently, the only allowable values are 14 and 30.  The default is 30.  Note that kernels
	      older than 0.99p7 only accept namelength 14.

       -i inodecount
	      Specify the number of inodes for the filesystem.

       -l filename
	      Read the list of bad blocks from filename.  The file has one bad-block number per line.  The count of bad blocks read is printed.

       -1     Make a Minix version 1 filesystem.

       -2, -v Make a Minix version 2 filesystem.

       -3     Make a Minix version 3 filesystem.

EXIT CODES

       The exit code returned by mkfs.minix is one of the following:

       0      No errors

       8      Operational error

       16     Usage or syntax error

SEE ALSO

       mkfs(8), fsck(8), reboot(8)

AVAILABILITY

       The mkfs.minix command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

util-linux							     June 2011							     MKFS.MINIX(8)

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