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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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xfs_freeze(8)						      System Manager's Manual						     xfs_freeze(8)

NAME
xfs_freeze - suspend access to an XFS filesystem SYNOPSIS
xfs_freeze -f | -u mount-point DESCRIPTION
xfs_freeze suspends and resumes access to an XFS filesystem (see xfs(5)). xfs_freeze halts new access to the filesystem and creates a stable image on disk. xfs_freeze is intended to be used with volume managers and hardware RAID devices that support the creation of snapshots. The mount-point argument is the pathname of the directory where the filesystem is mounted. The filesystem must be mounted to be frozen (see mount(8)). The -f flag requests the specified XFS filesystem to be frozen from new modifications. When this is selected, all ongoing transactions in the filesystem are allowed to complete, new write system calls are halted, other calls which modify the filesystem are halted, and all dirty data, metadata, and log information are written to disk. Any process attempting to write to the frozen filesystem will block waiting for the filesystem to be unfrozen. Note that even after freezing, the on-disk filesystem can contain information on files that are still in the process of unlinking. These files will not be unlinked until the filesystem is unfrozen or a clean mount of the snapshot is complete. The -u flag is used to un-freeze the filesystem and allow operations to continue. Any filesystem modifications that were blocked by the freeze are unblocked and allowed to complete. One of -f or -u must be supplied to xfs_freeze. NOTES
A copy of a frozen XFS filesystem will usually have the same universally unique identifier (UUID) as the original, and thus may be pre- vented from being mounted. The XFS nouuid mount option can be used to circumvent this issue. In Linux kernel version 2.6.29, the interface which XFS uses to freeze and unfreeze was elevated to the VFS, so that this tool can now be used on many other Linux filesystems. SEE ALSO
xfs(5), lvm(8), mount(8). xfs_freeze(8)
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