Length: 60 minutes
ext2fs is the most popular disk filesystem type for Linux systems. I show the general organization of the kernel filesystem code, walk through the details of the mount operation, and discuss the layout of the inodes and the filesystem itself.
The talk explores the internal operations of such fundamental commands as mount, lseek, open, link, unlink, rename, and chown, and explores what fsck is really doing.
The following year, I gave a followup talk about the Unix process structure. I later revised the talk to include more detailed Perl examples. The original talk about processes and the revised version with examples are both available.
In 2007, I was going to give a revised version of this talk, but I ended up revising it into an entirely new talk. The new talk is called What's a File? and spends less time grovelling over kernel source code and more time talking about what is really going on. I learned a few things about writing talks in the six intervening years!
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