Version 0.1 First draft

Lecture: 50 years in filesystems

Writing data to disk – how hard can it be, and what have we learned in the last 5 decades?

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?

I have a series of blog articles on filesystems that I can turn into a lecture easily.

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/05/50-years-in-filesystems-1974.html
Original Unix filesystem and why does that have limits?

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/06/50-years-in-filesystems-1984.html
Ten years later, the BSD FFS and what problems does it solve? File Layout, Fragmentation, larger files and larger inodes, other improvements.

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/12/50-years-in-filesystems-1994.html
SGI XFS, and what problems did that solve – extents, trees as directories, trees everywhere, very large filesystems, allocation zones and locking, multithreaded access.

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/15/50-years-in-filesystems-vnodes.html
A short detour: Multiple file systems in the operating system and Sun VFS (and Linux VFS).

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/05/17/50-years-in-filesystems-towards-2004-lfs.html
LFS - Log Structured File Systems, and how we learned to not care about layouting files on disk.

https://blog.koehntopp.info/2023/08/09/frueher-hatten-wir-festplatten.html
NVME and what does it change, also what if we had persistent memory, and what is AS/400

Missing, to be done:
ZFS as one kind of mutable immutable data structure, and a detour on volume management (and how ZFS integrates that, while others don't).
Object Storage, the other kind of immutable data storage, Metadata, and how this ties with distributed storage and caching, (https://blog.koehntopp.info/2020/10/05/what-are-the-problems-with-posix.html).

Info

Day: 2025-08-16
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 01:00
Room: HS 1/2
Track: Retro-Computing - VAXination becoming cool again
Language: de

Links:

Concurrent Events