In this post, we discuss the internals of a FAT based file system. FAT stands for File Allocation Table, which is also the name of the central data structure of this design. It is one of the oldest file system designs still in use – your pen drive is probably formatted with some variant of it (FAT32 or exFAT). The layout A FAT file system has a fairly simple on-disk layout: ...
In this post, we are going to discuss the internals of an inode based file system. There are different variants of inode: i-node, I-node, and, of course, inode. We are going to be using “inode” for this post. What is an inode? Inode is a data structure, used by modern file systems, such as ext4, to track the contents of a file across the disk. An inode is associated with every file and directory. Technically, from the point of view of a file system, there is no difference between the inode of a file or a directory. They are basically the same, with a flag in the inode stating whether it is pointing to a file or a directory. ...