simplefs - a ridiculosly simple file system from the scratch

[Sankar P]

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Rajat Sharma <fs.rajat at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey buddy, its a good work. You never know how many people you end up
> helping with this code. I would definitely recommend this as a
> starter.
>

Thank you so much :) It feels so nice to hear this from you :)

> One recommendation: add support for page-cache. Start with read-cache
> only, and then mmap support, you need that to allow binary execution.
>

oh okay. You suggest that I should do this before I start implementing
the support for extents ?

Sankar

> -Rajat
>
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 12:27 AM, Sankar P <sankar.curiosity at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> For learning purposes, I thought I would implement a filesystem from
>> the scratch. It has reached a state where I can do a 1.0 release.
>>
>> The sources are at: https://github.com/psankar/simplefs
>>
>> The layout is simple. The first (zeroth) block is the superblock and
>> contains information like fs magic, number of inodes, freeblock map
>> etc. The next block is the inode store. Creation of files and
>> directories is supported. Nested directories are supported. A file can
>> grow up to one block only. The data blocks for a directory contain the
>> filename and inode number of its children. For files, it will
>> obviously contain the actual data of the file. There are three
>> rudimentary locks to make sure the accesses are thread safe.
>>
>> The 1.0 version is filled with a lot of TODOs and memory leaks. Also
>> while implementing this, I realized that it is a bad idea to maintain
>> the superblock and the freeblock store together in a block. So I am
>> planning to change the on-disk layout in the next version.
>>
>> Apart from moving the super block to minimize locks, I am planning to
>> implement support for extents in the next version, and journalling in
>> the next-to-next version. The next version will take some time to
>> come, though. But if someone wants to try filesystems from the
>> scratch, I thought it may be useful if I share the link now itself.
>>
>> Also, I take this moment to thank the kernelnewbies list, especially
>> the regular people like Mulyadi Santosa, Valdis Kletnieks, Rajat
>> Sharma, Greg Freemyer etc. Also I would like to thank Neha Naik,
>> Manish Katiyar who helped me with some queries during this particular
>> implementation. I saw that Manish Katiyar has also done a similar
>> from-the-scratch implementation and it motivated me to pursue further.
>>
>> Any feedback on the code is welcome. Although, I want to inform that I
>> plan to change the locking until after I decide on a good on-disk
>> layout for the next version, which will by-design minimize the locking
>> needs, by splitting out freestore from superblock, keep track of
>> children inode in a better way etc. Also I have been resisting the
>> urge to look at ext or any other filesystem's design so as to not skew
>> my thoughts and go with a fresh state of mind and get my own design :)
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> --
>> Sankar P
>> http://psankar.blogspot.com
>>
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-- 
Sankar P
http://psankar.blogspot.com