50 years in filesystems
16.08.2025 , HS 1/2
Sprache: English

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?


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.

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Kristian Köhntopp has been online since 1989, and did multiple things since then.