Writing Linux Filesystem 4Fun

In May I did a talk for C/Cpp Dublin meetup group, which took place in MongoDB office. During the presentation, I went from a historical background to the real implementation of simple filesystem on the Linux.

Dummy FS motivation

Filesystems were the part of the OS that I usually felt is lacking in my knowledge. After I changed my employer I started working with storage stack. This change result with the feeling that is a right time to change my state of knowledge. As part of learning, I wrote a simple filesystem which I called “dummy filesystem”. (The name dummyFS is because the implementation is trivial). I paid most attention to structures used to represent filesystem, disk layout and the way how OS (in this case Linux) interact with FS.

Writing Linux FS4Fun

Recording can be found on the youtube:

Also please take a look on other presentation from C/Cpp Dublin User Group meetups there is a lot of interesting stuff.

The slides can be found here and last but not least FS implementation on my github

Futher live of dummy filesystem

I plan to release a few more releases of dummyFS, to go through more advanced topics from FS area:

  • Provide real FS algorithms for managing block allocation, bitmaps and extensions
  • Implement virtual memory capabilities
  • Change FSlayout from an update in place to copy on write.

YT Recording: