MODERN OPERATING SYSTEMS

Third Edition

ANDREW S. TANENBAUM

Chapter 4
File Systems

Slides modified from:

Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File Systems (1)

Essential requirements for long-term

information storage:

• It must be possible to store a very large amount

of information.
• The information must survive the termination of
the process using it.
• Multiple processes must be able to access the
information concurrently.

Slides modified from:

Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File Systems (2)

Think of a disk as a linear sequence of fixed-size

blocks and supporting reading and writing of
blocks. Questions that quickly arise:

• How do you find information?

• How do you keep one user from reading another’s data?
• How do you know which blocks are free?

Slides modified from:

Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File Structure

Figure 4-2. Three kinds of files. (a) Byte sequence.

(b) Record sequence. (c) Tree.
Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File Types

Figure 4-3. (a) An executable file. (b) An archive.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File Attributes

Figure 4-4a. Some possible file attributes.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
Hierarchical Directory Systems (2)

Figure 4-7. A hierarchical directory system.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 Path Names

Figure 4-8. A UNIX directory tree.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 File System Layout

Figure 4-9. A possible file system layout.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 Implementing Files
• A file on the disk may span several
blocks
• Need to keep track of which disk block
go with which file
• Various methods are used in different
OSs for such tracking
• Contiguous allocation
• Linked list allocation
 Contiguous Allocation

Figure 4-10. (a) Contiguous allocation of disk space for 7 files.

(b) The state of the disk after files D and F have been removed.
Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 Contiguous Allocation
• Advantages
• Simple to implement – just need to remember two numbers: i)
disk address of the first block; ii) number of blocks in the file
• Excellent read performance – seek and rotational delays are
minimized
• Bo the sequential and random accesses are fast
• Disadvantages
• Disk becomes fragmented over time
• Need to specify the size of the file at the time of file creation to
locate the right size hole in the fragmented disk to store the file
• How about word processing (document) files
• Works for CDROM where all the file sizes are known in advance.
 Linked List Allocation

Figure 4-11. Storing a file as a linked list of disk blocks.

Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 Linked List Allocation
• Advantages
• No space is lost to disk fragmentation
• Directory entry (I-node) can store the address of the
first block
• Disadvantages
• Sequential access is straightforward; however,
random access is extremely slow
• To get to block n, the OS has to start at the
beginning and read all the n-1 blocks first
• Amount of data stored in each block is not a power of
two because the pointer takes a few bytes – having
peculiar size is less efficient because many programs
read and write in blocks whose size is a power of two
 Linked List Allocation
• Both disadvantages of linked list allocation can
be eliminated by taking the pointer word from
each disk block and putting it in a table in
memory
 Linked List Allocation Using a Table in Memory

File A uses blocks 4, 7, 2, 10, and 12

File B users blocks 6, 3, 11, and 14
Such table in memory is called File Allocation Table (FAT)
Slides modified from:
Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 FAT
• Disadvantages
• The entire table must be kept in memory
• With a 200-GB disk and 1-KB block size, need to
store 200 million entries
• 4bytes per entry  800MB of main memory for
FAT
• FAT does not scale well to large disks
 I-nodes

Figure 4-13. An example i-node.

Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 The Linux Ext2 File System (4)

Slides modified from:

Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems 3 e, (c) 2008 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-6006639
 The Linux Ext2 File System (4)
• If a disk block is 1 KB and the disk address is 4 bytes
- Direct disk block field – 12 blocks
- Works for files <= 12KB
- Single indirect block -- 1024/4 = 256 addresses
- works for files <= 256KB + 12KB = 268KB
- Double indirect block – 256 * 256 = 65,536 addresses
- works for files <= 12KB + 256KB + 64MB ≈ 64.26 MB
- Triple indirect block – 256*256*256 = 16,777,216 addresses
- works for files <= 12KB + 256KB + 64 MB + 16 GB
≈16.0627GB