File System Motivation

• more storage than is available in a process's memory
• persistence of information across process termination and system crashes
• information sharing among processes
• solution: store information on disk in named units called files
• files are only deleted by explicit user action
• file system design must decide on
  • file/directory (folder) structure(s)
  • file names (length and structure)
  • what access is supported for files, including what protection is allowed and what operations are supported
  • how these operations are implemented given a persistent (block?) device
• first three are user interface issues, last is an implementation issue

File Names

• a name is the way of referring to a persistent object (pointers are a kind of name, but not very user-friendly)
• file names are often limited in length, e.g. 8 or 255 characters
• some operating systems distinguish between upper- and lower-case names (e.g. Unix), others don't (e.g. Windows/Dos)
• some operating systems support a single extension (following a period) and ascribe significance to it, others support arbitrary extensions (e.g. .tar.gz) and the operating system itself does not care about the extension

File Structures

• most common these days is the unstructured file consisting of an arbitrary-length sequence of bytes: Unix, Dos/Windows
• files could also be composed of a sequence of fixed-sized records, in which case read, write, and positioning operations access records, not bytes
• each record can also contain a distinct key (perhaps unique, perhaps not), and the file system may structure the file to make access by key efficient, e.g. as a tree or using an index (Indexed Sequential Access Method, ISAM, on IBM, then DEC/VMS)
• operating systems are starting to offer versions of content-based (associative) access to files, which creates an index across an entire file system -- not (yet) commonly supported by the OS, though I think BeOS had it integrated

File Types

• Unix: regular files, directories, device files including character special files and block special files
• ASCII (text) files contain 0 or more arbitrary-length lines, typically ended by a newline ('\n') in Unix, or a carriage-return + newline ("\r\n") in Windows/Dos -- "\r\n" is standard
• binary files usually have internal structure, but that structure is entirely defined by the program that creates them, e.g. MS-Word files or executable files
• example: archive file has a collection of headers followed by object modules. Each header has the module name, date, owner, protection, and size.
• windows file types defined by the extension, implies a default program to be used to access the file: easier to use, but less flexible

File Access

• files are normally accessed sequentially:
  • an editor may read the entire file into memory before editing
  • an daemon reads its entire configuration file when it starts
  • a compiler reads and processes a file linearly, from start to end
  • a server reads a file one (arbitrary sized) block at a time and sends the block
• some programs, especially data base or similar systems, need random access to files -- position can be specified as part of the read or write call, or by a separate seek operation
• many programs that need to be efficient now map files into their virtual memory, then let the operating system page them in as needed

File Attributes

• size (and maybe maximum size and/or record size, key offset in record)
• creation time, time of last (read, modify) access
• owner (and maybe group)
• permissions (read/write/execute/visible/system)
• has this file been archived? is it temporary? is it locked?

File Operations

• create, delete (unlink)
• open, close
• read, write, append, seek
• get and set attributes
• rename

Directories

• directory (folder) systems are used to structure files
• directories are usually hierarchical when strictly looked at (e.g. by a program), but have some escapes to allow loops (e.g. Unix parent directory ".." and symbolic links, Windows "My computer" and other links)
• often each user has his/her own directory, e.g. /usr/loginname or /home/loginname or /home/mount/loginname (e.g. uhunix)
• a directory is usually a special kind of file which may or may not support specific regular file operations, but usually supports operations such as create, delete, open, close, read (one record at a time), rename (a subfile), link (a subfile), unlink (a subfile)
• Unix has hard links (multiple hard links to a file, possibly with different names, are equivalent) and soft links
• when the last hard link to a file is unlinked, the file is removed (file attributes include a reference count of links)
• a file may have any number of soft links (essentially, the name of the hard link stored in the soft link file), which can work across file systems, but become invalid if the file is removed

Directory Structures

• very simple systems might only have a single-level (top-level) directory
• most systems allow almost arbitrary depth
• a file name is generally interpreted either relative to a per-process current (working) directory, or as an absolute path name (beginning with "/" in Unix-like systems)
• some operating systems allow a process to set the root of its file system (chroot), which may provide more security if the process is engaging in risky activities (i.e. listening on the network)
• directories are stored in (special) files, usually containing at least the names of the subfiles, pointers to the data, and either the attributes or pointers to the attributes
• which is more efficient: to store all the attributes in the directory, or to have a pointer to the attributes in the directory? Which is simpler?

File System Implementation

• keeping track of which blocks of data belong to which file:
  • contiguous allocation is simple and makes sequential or random access fast, but also requires knowing the file size when allocating and may give fragmentation such that the space is available but not usable (until defragmentation)
  • linked list allocation makes sequential access fast, but random access is very slow and block sizes are not powers of two bytes.
  • linked list allocation in memory keeps a global table with one pointer per block (table is in memory while running, frequently backed up on disk), sequential and random access is fast, block sizes are a power of two, but the memory table may be large (4GB disk with 16K blocks requires 1M of RAM)
  • i-node (index node) allocation keeps a per-file table of blocks, sequentially ordered, and stored on disk until the file is opened. The inode may also store the file attributes, and some of the entries may point to indirect blocks which contain more pointers. Fast for sequential and random access, does not use a lot of memory or disk, does not cause fragmentation
• some versions of Unix used i-nodes with 13 block addresses per inode
• this makes the inode constant size and such that it fits in a block
• if more than 10 data blocks are needed, the 11th pointer is a single indirect block, i.e. points to a block containing addresses of data blocks
• if this is not sufficient, the 12th pointer is a double indirect block, containing the address of a block which contains addresses of blocks of addresses of data blocks
• the last address is a triple-indirect block
• if each indirect block holds the addresses of up to 64 other blocks of 512 bytes each, what is the maximum file size (in bytes) in this system?