List of file systems

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on file systems. Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system itself.

Disk file systems

Disk file systems are usually block-oriented. Files in a block-oriented file system are sequences of blocks, often featuring fully random-access read, write, and modify operations.

  • Acorn's Advanced Disc filing system, successor to DFS
    .
  • AdvFS – Advanced File System, designed by Digital Equipment Corporation for their Digital UNIX (now Tru64 UNIX) operating system.
  • APFS – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
  • Syllable
    . Also called AFS.
  • BFS – the Boot File System used on System V release 4.0 and UnixWare.
  • BFS – the Be File System used on BeOS, occasionally misnamed as BeFS. Open source implementation called OpenBFS is used by the Haiku operating system.
  • Byte File System (BFS) - file system used by z/VM for Unix applications
  • Btrfs – is a copy-on-write file system for Linux announced by Oracle in 2007 and published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
  • CFS – The Cluster File System from Veritas, a Symantec company. It is the parallel access version of VxFS.
  • CP/M file system — Native filesystem used in the CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) operating system which was first released in 1974.
  • Acorn
    's Disc filing system.
  • DOS 3.x – Original floppy operating system and file system developed for the Apple II.
  • Extent File System (EFS) – an older block filing system under IRIX.
  • ext – Extended file system, designed for Linux systems.
  • ext2 – Second extended file system, designed for Linux systems.
  • ext3 – A journaled form of ext2.
  • ext4 – A follow-up for ext3 and also a journaled filesystem with support for extents.
  • ext3cow – A versioning file system form of ext3.
  • 32-bit
    table depths.
  • FFS (Amiga) – Fast File System, used on Amiga systems. This FS has evolved over time. Now counts FFS1, FFS Intl, FFS DCache, FFS2.
  • BSD
    systems
  • FossilPlan 9 from Bell Labs snapshot archival file system.
  • Files-11OpenVMS file system; also used on some PDP-11 systems; supports record-oriented files
  • Flex machine file system
  • HAMMER — clustered DragonFly BSD filesystem, production-ready since DragonFly 2.2 (2009)[1][2]
  • HAMMER2 — recommended as the default root filesystem in DragonFly since 5.2 release in 2018[3][4][5]
  • HFS – Hierarchical File System in IBM's MVS from MVS/ESA OpenEdition through z/OS V2R4; not to be confused with Apple's HFS. IBM stated that z/OS users should migrate from HFS to zFS, and in z/OS V2R5 dropped support for HFS.
  • HFS – Hierarchical File System, in use until HFS+ was introduced on Mac OS 8.1. Also known as Mac OS Standard format. Successor to Macintosh File System (MFS) & predecessor to HFS+; not to be confused with IBM's HFS provided with z/OS
  • HFS+ – Updated version of Apple's HFS, Hierarchical File System, supported on Mac OS 8.1 & above, including macOS. Supports file system journaling, enabling recovery of data after a system crash. Also referred to as 'Mac OS Extended format or HFS Plus
  • HPFS – High Performance File System, used on OS/2
  • SCO OpenServer
  • Joliet
    are extensions to this)
  • AIX. Supports extents
    .
  • LFS – 4.4BSD implementation of a log-structured file system
  • MFS – Macintosh File System, used on early Classic Mac OS systems. Succeeded by Hierarchical File System (HFS).
  • Next3 – A form of ext3 with snapshots support.[6]
  • MFS – TiVo's Media File System, a proprietary fault tolerant format used on TiVo hard drives for real time recording from live TV.
  • Minix file system – Used on Minix
    systems
  • NILFS – Linux implementation of a log-structured file system
  • NTFS – (New Technology File System) Used on Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems
  • NeXT - NeXTstation and NeXTcube file system
  • NetWare
    2.x–5.x file system, used optionally by later versions.
  • NetWare versions 5.0-up and recently ported to Linux
    .
  • Isilon. OneFS uses FlexProtect and Reed–Solomon
    encodings to support up to four simultaneous disk failures.
  • OFS – Old File System, on Amiga. Good for floppies, but fairly useless on hard drives.
  • OS-9 file system
  • PFS – and PFS2, PFS3, etc. Technically interesting file system available for the Amiga, performs very well under a lot of circumstances.
  • ProDOS – Operating system and file system successor to DOS 3.x, for use on Apple II series computers, including the IIgs
  • Qnx4fs – File system that is used in QNX
    version 4 and 6.
  • ReFS (Resilient File System) – File system by Microsoft with a particular focus on data resilience in server environments.
  • ReiserFS – File system that uses journaling
  • Reiser4 – File system that uses journaling, newest version of ReiserFS
  • Reliance
    – Datalight's transactional file system for high reliability applications
  • Reliance Nitro
    – Tree-based transactional file system developed for high-performance embedded systems, from Datalight
  • RFS – Native filesystem for RTEMS[7]
  • SkyFS – Developed for SkyOS
    to replace BFS as the operating system's main file system. It is based on BFS, but contains many new features.
  • SFS – Smart File System, journaling file system available for the Amiga platforms.
  • Apple Newton Platform
    , structured as a shallow database
  • Tux3 – An experimental versioning file system intended as a replacement for ext3
  • UDF – Packet-based file system for WORM/RW media such as CD-RW and DVD, now supports hard drives and flash memory as well.
  • BSD
    systems
  • BSD
    systems
  • DASD
    volume.
  • XFS – Used on SGI IRIX and Linux systems
  • zFSz/OS File System; not to be confused with other file systems named zFS or ZFS.
  • zFS - an IBM research project to develop a distributed, decentralized file system; not to be confused with other file systems named zFS or ZFS.
  • ZFS – a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems

File systems with built-in fault-tolerance

These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices:

File systems optimized for flash memory, solid state media

Solid state media, such as flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. At low level, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms. Typically a device such as a solid-state drive handles such operations internally and therefore a regular file system can be used. However, for certain specialized installations (embedded systems, industrial applications) a file system optimized for plain flash memory is advantageous.

  • APFS
    – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
  • CHFS – a NetBSD filesystem for embedded systems optimised for raw flash media.
  • XCFiles, an exFAT implementation for Wind River VxWorks
    and other embedded operating systems).
  • ExtremeFFS – internal filesystem for SSDs.
  • F2FS – Flash-Friendly File System. An open source Linux file system introduced by Samsung in 2012.[12]
  • FFS2 (presumably preceded by FFS1), one of the earliest flash file systems. Developed and patented by Microsoft in the early 1990s.[13]
  • JFFS – original log structured Linux file system for NOR flash media.
  • NOR flash
    .
  • LSFS – a Log-structured file system with writable snapshots and inline data deduplication created by StarWind Software
    . Uses DRAM and flash to cache spinning disks.
  • LogFS – intended to replace JFFS2, better scalability. No longer under active development.[14]
  • NILFS – a log-structured file system for Linux with continuous snapshots.
  • Non-Volatile File System – the system for flash memory introduced by Palm, Inc.
  • NOVA – the "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
  • Isilon
    . It supports selective placement of meta-data directly onto flash SSD.
  • Segger Microcontroller Systems emFile – filesystem for deeply embedded applications which supports both NAND and NOR flash. Wear leveling, fast read and write, and very low RAM usage.
  • SPIFFS – SPI Flash File System, a wear-leveling filesystem intended for small NOR flash devices.
  • TFAT – a transactional version of the FAT filesystem.
  • TrueFFS
    – internal file system for SSDs, implementing error correction, bad block re-mapping and wear-leveling.
  • NOR flash
    .
  • Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) – an internal file system utilized by NetApp within their DataONTAP OS, originally optimized to use non-volatile DRAM. WAFL uses RAID-DP to protect against multiple disk failures and NVRAM for transaction log replays.
  • YAFFS – a log-structured file system designed for NAND flash, but also used with NOR flash.
  • LittleFS – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers.
  • JesFS – Jo's embedded serial FileSystem.[15] A very small footprint and robust filesystem, designed for very small microcontroller (16/32 bit). Open Source and licensed under GPL v3.

Record-oriented file systems

In record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.

Shared-disk file systems

Shared-disk file systems (also called shared-storage file systems,

SAN file system, Clustered file system or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared-disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID
. Shared-disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.

Shared-disk file systems may be

symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata
servers.

Distributed file systems

access control lists
(ACLs), unless otherwise stated below.

Distributed fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed

offline
(disconnected) operation.

  • Coda from Carnegie Mellon University focuses on bandwidth-adaptive operation (including disconnected operation) using a client-side cache for mobile computing. It is a descendant of AFS-2. It is available for Linux under the GPL.
  • Distributed File System (Dfs) from Microsoft focuses on location transparency and high availability. Available for Windows under a proprietary software license.
  • Matt Dillon.[1][5]
  • Cluster File Systems uses synchronization over HTTP. Available for Linux under GPL but no longer in development since the developers are working on Lustre
    .
  • LizardFS a networking, distributed file system based on MooseFS[19]
  • Moose File System (MooseFS) is a networking, distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical locations (servers), which are visible to a user as one resource. Works on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris and macOS. Master server and chunkservers can also run on Solaris and Windows with Cygwin.
  • Scality is a distributed fault-tolerant filesystem.
  • Tahoe-LAFS is an open source secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem utilizing encryption as the basis for a least-authority replicated design.
  • A
    4690 OS. The distribution attributes are stored on a file-by-file basis in special entries in the directory table.[20][21]

Distributed parallel file systems

Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).

Some of the distributed parallel file systems use an

object storage device (OSD) (in Lustre called OST) for chunks of data together with centralized metadata
servers.

  • Lustre is an open-source high-performance distributed parallel file system for Linux, used on many of the largest computers in the world.
  • Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS, PVFS2, OrangeFS). Developed to store virtual system images, with a focus on non-shared writing optimizations. Available for Linux under GPL.

Distributed parallel fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed file systems, which also are

fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters
.

All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.

Name By License OS Description
Alluxio
UC Berkeley, Alluxio
Apache License
cross-platform
An open-source virtual distributed file system (VDFS).
BeeGFS (formerly FhGFS) Fraunhofer Society GNU
GPL v2 for client, other components are proprietary
Linux A free to use file system with optional professional support, designed for easy usage and high performance, used on some of the fastest computer clusters in the world. BeeGFS allows replication of storage volumes with automatic failover and self-healing.
CephFS Inktank Storage, a company acquired by Red Hat GNU
LGPL
Linux kernel, FreeBSD via FUSE[22] A massively scalable object store. CephFS was merged into the Linux kernel in 2010. Ceph's foundation is the
reliable autonomic distributed object store
(RADOS), which provides object storage via programmatic interface and S3 or Swift REST APIs, block storage to QEMU/KVM/Linux hosts, and POSIX filesystem storage which can be mounted by Linux kernel and FUSE clients.
Chiron FS GNU
GPL v3
It's a FUSE-based, transparent replication file system, layering on an existing file system and implementing at the file system level what RAID 1 does at the device level. A notably convenient consequence is the possibility of picking single target directories, without the need of replicating entire partitions. (The project has no visible activity after 2008, a status request in Oct. 2009 in the chironfs-forum is unanswered.)
CloudStore
Kosmix
Apache License
Quantcast File System (QFS)
dCache DESY and others proprietary (Free for non-commercial usage)[23] A write once filesystem, accessible via various protocols.
General Parallel File System
(GPFS)
IBM Proprietary AIX, Linux and Windows A
replication
between attached block storage, and asynchronous replication to remote filesystems. Also support erasure coding on dual homed SAS attached storage, and distributed over multiple storage nodes.
Gfarm file system NPO Tsukuba OSS Technical Support Center
X11 License
Solaris
Uses
FUSE
for mounting.
GlusterFS
Gluster, a company acquired by Red Hat GNU
GPL v3
Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris A general purpose distributed file system for scalable storage. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband
GlusterFS
is the main component in Red Hat Storage Server.
Google File System (GFS) Google internal software Focus on
throughput and scalability
.
Hadoop Distributed File System
Apache Software Foundation
Apache License
Cross-platform Open source GoogleFS clone.
IBRIX Fusion
IBRIX
Proprietary
JuiceFS Juicedata
Apache License
cross-platform
An open-source POSIX-compliant file system built on top of Redis and object storage (e.g. Amazon S3), designed and optimized for cloud native environment.
LizardFS Skytechnology GNU
GPL v3
cross-platform
An open source, highly available POSIX-compliant file system that supports Windows clients.
Lustre originally developed by
Cluster File Systems
and currently supported by OpenSFS
GNU
LGPL
Linux A
HPC systems. Lustre has high availability via storage failover
.
MapR FS MapR Proprietary Linux Highly scalable, POSIX compliant, fault tolerant, read/write filesystem with a distributed, fault tolerant metadata service. It provides an HDFS and NFS interface to clients as well as a noSQL table interface and Apache Kafka compatible messaging system.
MooseFS
Core Technology GNU
GPL v2 and proprietary[24]
cross-platform (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, macOS, OpenSolaris
)
A fault tolerant, highly available and high performance scale-out network distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical commodity x86 servers, which are visible to the user as one namespace. For standard file operations MooseFS acts like any other Unix-like file systems.
ObjectiveFS Objective Security Corporation Proprietary Linux, macOS POSIX-compliant shared distributed filesystem. Uses object store as a backend. Runs on AWS S3, GCS and object store devices.
OneFS distributed file system
Isilon
Proprietary[25] FreeBSD BSD-based OS on dedicated Intel based hardware, serving NFS v3 and SMB/CIFS to
UNIX clients under a proprietary software
.
OIO-FS OpenIO Proprietary Linux OIO-FS provides file-oriented access to
FUSE technology and presents a POSIX file system to users. This access can be used locally, or over a network using NFS or SMB.[26]
PanFS Panasas Proprietary Linux, macOS, FreeBSD A
scale-out object store
, and is focused on transparent failure recovery and ease of use.
Quobyte DCFS Quobyte Proprietary Linux, macOS, FreeBSD A fault-tolerant,
parallel POSIX file system, with block (VMs) and object (S3) interfaces, and advanced enterprise features like multi-tenancy, strong authentication, encryption. Split-brain safe fault-tolerance is achieved through Paxos-based leader election and erasure coding
.
RozoFS Rozo Systems GNU
GPL v2
Linux A
Mojette erasure code to reduce significantly the amount of redundancy (compared to plain replication
).
Scality Scality ring Proprietary Linux A POSIX file system[citation needed] focused on high availability and performance. Also provides S3/REST/NFS interfaces.
Tahoe-LAFS Tahoe-LAFS Software Foundation GNU
GPL v2+ and other[27]
Windows, Linux, macOS A secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant,
distributed file system
.
XtreemFS Contrail E.U. project, the German MoSGrid project and the German project "First We Take Berlin"
BSD 3-Clause[28]
Solaris, macOS
, Windows
A
cluster
.

In development:

Peer-to-peer file systems

Some of these may be called cooperative storage cloud.

Special-purpose file systems

  • aufs an enhanced version of UnionFS stackable unification file system
  • XIP
    )
  • Barracuda WebDAV plug-in. Secure Network File Server for embedded devices.
  • Boot File System is used on UnixWare to store files necessary for its boot process.
  • cdfs (reading and writing of CDs)
  • Compact Disc File System (reading and writing of CDs; experimental)
  • cfs
    (caching)
  • Cramfs (small footprint compressed read-only)
  • Davfs2 (WebDAV)
  • Freenet
    – Decentralized, censorship-resistant
  • FTPFS (FTP access)
  • GmailFS (Google Mail File System)
  • GridFS – GridFS is a specification for storing and retrieving files that exceed the BSON-document size limit of 16 MB for MongoDB.
  • lnfs (long names)
  • LTFS
    (Linear Tape File System for LTO and Enterprise tape)
  • MVFS – MultiVersion File System, proprietary, used by Rational ClearCase
    .
  • Nexfs Combines Block, File, Object and Cloud storage into a single pool of auto-tiering POSIX compatible storage.
  • filesystem implementation for Linux. Used mainly by Docker
    for its image layers.
  • romfs
  • SquashFS (compressed read-only)
  • VFAT
    long file names), used for Linux
  • UnionFS – stackable unification file system, which can appear to merge the contents of several directories (branches), while keeping their physical content separate
  • Venti – Plan 9 de-duplicated storage used by Fossil.

Pseudo file systems

  • devfs
    – a virtual file system in Unix-like operating systems for managing device nodes on-the-fly
  • procfs – a pseudo-file system, used to access kernel information about processes
  • tmpfs – in-memory temporary file system (on Unix-like platforms)
  • sysfs – a virtual file system in Linux holding information about buses, devices, firmware, filesystems, etc.
  • debugfs – a virtual file system in Linux for accessing and controlling kernel debugging
  • configfs – a writable file system used to configure various kernel components of Linux
  • sysctlfs – allow accessing sysctl nodes via a file system; available on NetBSD via PUFFS,[29] FreeBSD kernel via a 3rd-party module,[30][31][32] and Linux as a part of Linux procfs.[33]
  • kernfs – a file system found on some BSD systems (notably NetBSD) that provides access to some kernel state variables; similar to sysctlfs, Linux procfs and Linux sysfs.
  • wikifs – a server application for Plan 9's virtual, wiki
    , file system

Encrypted file systems

File system interfaces

These are not really file systems; they allow access to file systems from an operating system standpoint.

  • FUSE (file system in userspace, like LUFS
    but better maintained)
  • FUSE
    )
  • PUFFS (Userspace filesystem for NetBSD, including a compatibility layer called librefuse for porting existing FUSE-based applications)
  • secure shell
    login.
  • VFS Virtual Filesystem

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Koen Vervloesem (2010-04-21). "DragonFly BSD 2.6: towards a free clustering operating system". LWN.net. Retrieved 2019-03-07.
  2. ^
    Matt Dillon (2017-09-23). "hammer_disk.h". BSD Cross Reference. DragonFly BSD
    . Retrieved 2019-03-06.
  3. ^ "DragonFly BSD 5.2". DragonFly BSD. 2018-06-18. Retrieved 2019-03-06. We can now recommend H2 as the default root filesystem in non-clustered mode.
  4. ^
    Matt Dillon (2018-05-05). "hammer2_disk.h". BSD Cross Reference. DragonFly BSD
    . Retrieved 2019-03-06.
  5. ^
    Matt Dillon (2018-12-09). "hammer2/DESIGN". BSD Cross Reference. DragonFly BSD
    . Retrieved 2019-03-06.
  6. ^ Corbet, Jonathan. "The Next3 filesystem". LWN.
  7. ^ "RTEMS File System". Retrieved 20 April 2013.
  8. ^ Overstreet, Kent. "Bcachefs main site".
  9. ^ Edge, Jake. "LWN - An update on bcachefs".
  10. ^ "Bcachefs merged in linux 6.7".
  11. ^ Overstreet, Kent. "Bcachefs on Patreon".
  12. ^ Michael Larabel (2011-10-05). "Samsung Introduces New Linux File-System: F2FS". phoronix.com. Retrieved 2012-12-07.
  13. ^ "United States Patent: 5392427". Patft.uspto.gov. Retrieved 2012-06-15.
  14. ^ "Linux Kernel Mailing List: logfs: remove from tree". Retrieved 2017-03-31.
  15. ^ "Jo's Embedded Serial File System (for Standard Serial NOR-Flash)". GitHub. 2019-06-18.
  16. S2CID 12982770
    .
  17. ^ IBM. 4690 OS Programming Guide Version 5.2, IBM document SC30-4137-01, 2007-12-06 ([1]).
  18. ^ Caldera (1997). Caldera OpenDOS Machine Readable Source Kit 7.01. The FDOS.EQU file in the machine readable source kit has equates for the corresponding directory entries.
  19. ^ LizardFS.org
  20. ^ IBM (2003). Information about 4690 OS unique file distribution attributes, IBM document R1001487, 2003-07-30. ("IBM Information about 4690 OS unique file distribution attributes - United States". Archived from the original on 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2014-05-20.): "[...] file types are stored in the "Reserved bits" portion of the PC-DOS file directory structure [...] only 4690 respects and preserves these attributes. Various non-4690 operating systems take different actions if these bits are turned on [...] when copying from a diskette created on a 4690 system. [...] PC-DOS and Windows 2000 Professional will copy the file without error and zero the bits. OS/2 [...] 1.2 [...] will refuse to copy the file unless [...] first run CHKDSK /F on the file. After [...] CHKDSK, it will copy the file and zero the bits. [...] when [...] copy [...] back to the 4690 system, [...] file will copy as a local file."
  21. ^ IBM. 4690 save and restore file distribution attributes. IBM document R1000622, 2010-08-31 ("IBM 4690 save and restore file distribution attributes - United States". Archived from the original on 2014-05-21. Retrieved 2014-05-20.).
  22. ^ "net/ceph14: Ceph delivers object, block, and file storage in a unified system". FreshPorts. Retrieved 2021-07-11.
  23. ^ "dCache Software License".
  24. ^ "MooseFS".
  25. ^ "OneFS 8.1 eLicensing and remote support changes".
  26. ^ "Features of OIO-FS — OpenIO SDS 18.10 Object Storage documentation". docs.openio.io. Retrieved 2018-12-20.
  27. ^ "about.rst in trunk/docs – tahoe-lafs". Tahoe-lafs.org. Retrieved 2014-02-09.
  28. ^ "XtreemFS - License".
  29. ^ "mount_sysctlfs(8)". NetBSD Manual Pages. 2010-04-11. Retrieved 2021-07-10.
  30. ^ Pawel Jakub Dawidek (2002-12-24). "sysctlfs.README". Archived from the original (text/plain) on 2005-02-23. Retrieved 2021-07-10.
  31. ^ Pawel Jakub Dawidek (2002-12-24). "Re: Hmm, sysctlfs". Retrieved 2021-07-10.
  32. ^ "Hacking FreeBSD / sysctlfs / [9a7ced]". SourceForge. Retrieved 2021-07-10.
  33. ^ Terrehon Bowden; Bodo Bauer; Shen Feng. "Chapter 2: Modifying System Parameters - The /proc Filesystem". The Linux Kernel. Retrieved 2021-07-10.

External links