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Disk Structures

We always have a root file system / and mounted files systems have a bit set in the inode indicating that they are mounted file systems. The inode has a device number which is looked up in the mount table.

Every file system is a seperate system resource. The first logical sector contains a boot block (sector) containing a bootstrap program.

The Superblock contains static parameters of the file system including:

Free blocks are removed and pushed from the front of the free blocks list. This allocation operation causes a files to become more and more fragmented as disk activity continues. As a result BSD 7 used only 3% of the bandwidth available to the disk drive on average.

Changes in 4.2 BSD File allocation routines

To improve efficiency and robustness, cylinder groups where born.

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