A Short History of (Linux) Filesystems
summary
Outlines the evolution from Unix v6, Minix and FAT to modern Linux filesystems by linking concrete design choices: on-disk layouts, FAT’s file chains versus inode maps and bitmaps, journaling as a replayable log for recovery, and extents replacing triple-indirect block maps. Gives concrete capacity figures for direct and indirect block addressing (12 direct → ~48 KB; single → ~4 MB; double → ~8 GB; triple → ~4 TB) and demonstrates a working Java ext2 implementation (slower) plus using tune2fs -l to inspect superblock features.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Filesystem introduction
- 2:13Filesystem basics and inodes
- 9:56UNIX V6 and Minix
- 13:29FAT structure
- 17:22Linux ext2 block groups
- 24:10B-trees in filesystems
- 26:42ext3 and ext4 journaling
- 34:24XFS structure and allocation
- 37:53ZFS, Btrfs, f2fs trends
- 42:15Q&A
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