Other Supported File Systems - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - STORAGE ADMINISTRATION GUIDE 2-23-2010 Administration Manual

High Performance through Efficient Management of Disk Space
Free space and inodes are handled by B
greatly contributes to XFS's performance and scalability. XFS uses delayed allocation, which
handles allocation by breaking the process into two pieces. A pending transaction is stored in RAM
and the appropriate amount of space is reserved. XFS still does not decide where exactly (in file
system blocks) the data should be stored. This decision is delayed until the last possible moment.
Some short-lived temporary data might never make its way to disk, because it is obsolete by the time
XFS decides where actually to save it. In this way, XFS increases write performance and reduces file
system fragmentation. Because delayed allocation results in less frequent write events than in other
file systems, it is likely that data loss after a crash during a write is more severe.
Preallocation to Avoid File System Fragmentation
Before writing the data to the file system, XFS reserves (preallocates) the free space needed for a
file. Thus, file system fragmentation is greatly reduced. Performance is increased because the
contents of a file are not distributed all over the file system.

1.3 Other Supported File Systems

Table 1-1 summarizes some other file systems supported by Linux. They are supported mainly to
ensure compatibility and interchange of data with different kinds of media or foreign operating
systems.
File System Types in Linux
Table 1-1
File System Type
cramfs
hpfs
iso9660
minix
msdos
ncpfs
nfs
smbfs
sysv
ufs
umsdos
18 SLES 11: Storage Administration Guide
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trees inside the allocation groups. The use of B
Description
Compressed ROM file system: A compressed read-only file system for ROMs.
High Performance File System: The IBM* OS/2* standard file system. Only
supported in read-only mode.
Standard file system on CD-ROMs.
This file system originated from academic projects on operating systems and
was the first file system used in Linux. Today, it is used as a file system for
floppy disks.
fat , the file system originally used by DOS, is today used by various operating
systems.
File system for mounting Novell
Network File System: Here, data can be stored on any machine in a network
and access might be granted via a network.
Server Message Block is used by products such as Windows* to enable file
access over a network.
Used on SCO UNIX*, Xenix, and Coherent (commercial UNIX systems for
PCs).
Used by BSD*, SunOS*, and NextStep*. Only supported in read-only mode.
UNIX on MS-DOS*: Applied on top of a standard
UNIX functionality (permissions, links, long filenames) by creating special files.
®
volumes over networks.
file system, achieves
fat
+
trees