XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as of June 2014, XFS is supported by most Linux distributions; Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses it as its default file system.
ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling file system initially designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser and licensed under GPLv2. Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file system to be included in the standard kernel. ReiserFS was the default file system in Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise until Novell decided to move to ext3 on October 12, 2006, for future releases.
ext2, or second extended file system, is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed according to the same principles as the Berkeley Fast File System from BSD, it was the first commercial-grade filesystem for Linux.
ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on extending ext2 in Journaling the Linux ext2fs Filesystem in a 1998 paper, and later in a February 1999 kernel mailing list posting. The filesystem was merged with the mainline Linux kernel in November 2001 from 2.4.15 onward. Its main advantage over ext2 is journaling, which improves reliability and eliminates the need to check the file system after an unclean shutdown. Its successor is ext4.
In computing, particularly in the context of the Unix operating system and its workalikes, fork is an operation whereby a process creates a copy of itself. It is an interface which is required for compliance with the POSIX and Single UNIX Specification standards. It is usually implemented as a C standard library wrapper to the fork, clone, or other system calls of the kernel. Fork is the primary method of process creation on Unix-like operating systems.
The Installable File System (IFS) is a filesystem API in MS-DOS/PC DOS 4.x, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Windows that enables the operating system to recognize and load drivers for file systems.
These tables provide a comparison of operating systems, of computer devices, as listing general and technical information for a number of widely used and currently available PC or handheld operating systems. The article "Usage share of operating systems" provides a broader, and more general, comparison of operating systems that includes servers, mainframes and supercomputers.
In computing, a file system or filesystem is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stopped and the next began, or where any piece of data was located when it was time to retrieve it. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data are easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way a paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system."
A versioning file system is any computer file system which allows a computer file to exist in several versions at the same time. Thus it is a form of revision control. Most common versioning file systems keep a number of old copies of the file. Some limit the number of changes per minute or per hour to avoid storing large numbers of trivial changes. Others instead take periodic snapshots whose contents can be accessed with similar semantics to normal file access.
In computer systems, a snapshot is the state of a system at a particular point in time. The term was coined as an analogy to that in photography.
NILFS or NILFS2 is a log-structured file system implementation for the Linux kernel. It was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) CyberSpace Laboratories and a community from all over the world. NILFS was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file systems.
ext4 is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3.
dm-crypt is a transparent block device encryption subsystem in Linux kernel versions 2.6 and later and in DragonFly BSD. It is part of the device mapper (dm) infrastructure, and uses cryptographic routines from the kernel's Crypto API. Unlike its predecessor cryptoloop, dm-crypt was designed to support advanced modes of operation, such as XTS, LRW and ESSIV, in order to avoid watermarking attacks. In addition to that, dm-crypt addresses some reliability problems of cryptoloop.
Btrfs is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager, developed together. It was founded by Chris Mason in 2007 for use in Linux, and since November 2013, the file system's on-disk format has been declared stable in the Linux kernel.
In computer operating systems, mkfs is a command used to format a block storage device with a specific file system. The command is part of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. In Unix, a block storage device must be formatted with a file system before it can be mounted and accessed through the operating system's filesystem hierarchy.
A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system's main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a "journal", which is usually a circular log. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems can be brought back online more quickly with a lower likelihood of becoming corrupted.
Next3 is a journaling file system for Linux based on ext3 which adds snapshots support, yet retains compatibility to the ext3 on-disk format. Next3 is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the GPL license.
Bcachefs is a copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux-based operating systems. Its primary developer, Kent Overstreet, first announced it in 2015, and efforts are ongoing to have it included in the mainline Linux kernel. It is intended to compete with the modern features of ZFS or Btrfs, and the speed and performance of ext4 or XFS. It self-describes as "stable", as of December 2022.
