Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By : CH Raghav Maruthi
Book Image

Mastering Linux Kernel Development

By: CH Raghav Maruthi

Overview of this book

Mastering Linux Kernel Development looks at the Linux kernel, its internal arrangement and design, and various core subsystems, helping you to gain significant understanding of this open source marvel. You will look at how the Linux kernel, which possesses a kind of collective intelligence thanks to its scores of contributors, remains so elegant owing to its great design. This book also looks at all the key kernel code, core data structures, functions, and macros, giving you a comprehensive foundation of the implementation details of the kernel’s core services and mechanisms. You will also look at the Linux kernel as well-designed software, which gives us insights into software design in general that are easily scalable yet fundamentally strong and safe. By the end of this book, you will have considerable understanding of and appreciation for the Linux kernel.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Filesystems in the Linux kernel


Now that we are familiar with fundamental concepts related to filesystem implementations, we will explore filesystem services supported by Linux systems. The kernel's filesystem branch has implementations of numerous filesystem services, which support diverse file types. Based on the type of files they manage, the kernel's filesystems can be broadly categorized into:

  1. Storage filesystems
  2. Special filesystems
  3. Distributed filesystems or network filesystems

We shall discuss special filesystems in a later section of this chapter.

  • Storage filesystems: Kernel supports various persistent storage filesystems, which can be broadly categorized into various groups based on the type of storage device they are designed to manage.
  • Disk filesystems: This category includes various standard storage disk filesystems supported by the kernel, which includes the Linux native ext family of disk filesystems, such as Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, ReiserFS, and Btrfs; Unix variants such as the sysv filesystem...