A Comparison of File Systems

Submitted To:
Madam Sulema

Submitted By:
UMAR MOIN
USMAN RAUF

Subject:
Operating System

Class:
Bs (CE)-5A
Introduction:

In computing, a file system is a method for storing and organizing

computer files and the data they contain to make it easy to find and access
them. File systems may use a storage device such as a hard disk or CD-
ROM and involve maintaining the physical location of the files, they might
provide access to data on a file server by acting as clients for a network
protocol (e.g., NFS, SMB, or 9P clients), or they may be virtual and exist
only as an access method for virtual data (e.g. procfs).

Objectives/Scope:

The objective is to study and understand the way Windows and Linux
File Systems work and to differentiate between them on the basis of their
features.
We will try to study the following file systems:

• FAT-16
• FAT-32
• NTFS
• ReiserFS
• Ext2
• Ext3
• XFS
Methods:
The following methods will be used to illustrate the topic :

• Charts
• Tables
• Graphs
• Simulation
• Existing Research Papers(Optional/might or might not be done)

References:

Matt Blaze November 3-5, 1993

A Cryptographic File System for Unix
First ACM Conference on Communications and Computing Security
AT&T Bell Laboratories
101 Crawfords Corner Road, Room 4G-634
Holmdel, NJ 07733
mab@research.att.com

Douglas S. Santry1, Michael J. Feeley, Norman C. Hutchinson, Alistair C.

Veitchy,Ross W. Carton, and Jacob Ofir 1999
Deciding when to forget in the Elephant file system
1999 ACM 1-58113-140-2/99/0012... yStorage Systems Program Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories

Hardware White Paper

Designing Hardware for Microsoft ® Operating Systems
FAT: General Overview of On-Disk Format
Version 1.02, May 5, 1999
Microsoft Corporation
Hardware White Paper
Designing Hardware for Microsoft® Operating Systems
Microsoft Extensible Firmware Initiative
FAT32 File System Specification
FAT: General Overview of On-Disk Format
Version 1.03, December 6, 2000
Microsoft Corporation

Ray Bryant, SGI, raybry@sgi.com,Ruth Forester, IBM LTC,

rsf@us.ibm.com,John Hawkes, SGI, hawkes@sgi.com 2002
Filesystem Performance and Scalability in Linux 2.4.17
Originally published in Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX
Annual Technical Conference
(Berkeley, CA: USENIX Association 2002). Published by Permission.

Athicha Muthitacharoen, Benjie Chen, and David Mazi `eres

A Low-bandwidth Network File System
MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and NYU Department of
Computer Science
fathicha,benjieg@lcs.mit.edu, dm@cs.nyu.edu
This research was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San
Diego, under contract N66001-00-1-8927.

Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, Keith Bostic

A Pageable Memory Based Filesystem
Computer Systems Research Group
Computer Science Division
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720
email: mckusick@cs.Berkeley.EDU
telephone: 415-642-4948
Marshall Kirk McKusick, William N. Joy†,Samuel J. Leffler‡, Robert S.
Fabr
A Fast File System for UNIX*
Computer Systems Research Group
Computer Science Division
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
This work was done under grants from the National Science Foundation under grant MCS80-05144, and
the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DoD) under ARPA Order No. 4031 monitored by Naval
Electronic System Command under Contract No. N00039-82-C-0235.