Schedule FrOSCon 2025

Lecture: 50 years in filesystems

August 16, 2025
HS 1/2
Language: en
Retro-Computing - VAXination becoming cool again

Summary

Writing data to disk, how hard can it be? File systems are a special topic, because when you make a mistake, somebody is losing data and rollback ain't gonna fix it.
We have had innovations in filesystems roughly in intervals of a decade for the last 50 years. What have we learned, what has changed due to changes in technology, and where are we now?

Description

A tour of the V7 Unix file system, BSD FFS, SGI XFS, LFS and ZFS, and some remarks on modern environments. A technical tour of how we store data in Unix.