Kragen’s Amazing List of Filesystems

By Kragen Sitaker

Just a collection of interesting filesystem links. Most are for
Linux.

I’ll maintain this and organize it better if there’s demand.
🙂

Overlay filesystem, like union mounts:
http://home.att.net/~artnaseef/ovlfs/ovlfs.html

Working Version Filesystem, storing everything in CVS (IIRC)
over the network, compatible with NFS:
http://www.wv.com/
ftp://ftp.pn.com/pub/bb/wvfs
(Previously known as Pgfs, built on top of ‘ofs’ — open
filesystem.)

audiofs for Linux, like on SGIs, lets you access an audio CD as
a filesystem containing audio files:
http://www.lwn.net/1999/0429/a/audiofs.html

http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~ptolomei/audiofs/

‘wrapfs’ is a flexible fs, ported to Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, by
amd’s author:
My research Web page is: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ezk/research/

wofs, a WORM filesystem for SunOS (in German):

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/

http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/wofs.ps.gz

PerlFS, which lets you write filesystem drivers in Perl and run
them in userspace:
http://dd-sh.assurdo.com/perlfs/

. . . and stewart@neuron.com is writing a Java backend so you can
write Java fslets.

userfs, similar to PerlFS, but with backends in C++:
ftp://summersoft.fay.ar.us/pub/linux/RPMS
(0.9.6.2-2)
(previous versions, like 0.9.4.2, didn’t work with libc6/glibc)
mailing list at linux-userfs-request@vger.rutgers.edu

Originally by jeremy@sw.oz.au,
Jeremy Fitzhardinge, who abandoned it in 1997
More info (working version for Linux 2.2.6) at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~mccormack/userfs.html

Lots of nice information at http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/linuxkernel.html
on filesystems and other kernel things.

e2compr — transparent compression for ext2fs — is at
http://www.netspace.net.au/~reiter/e2compr/
or
http://debs.fuller.edu/e2compr/

Of course, there’s Coda, which is similar to AFS, but supports
disconnected operation:
http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

“Arla”, a free implementation of AFS (working client,
experimental kernel):
http://www.stacken.kth.se/projekt/arla/

arla-{announce,drinkers}@stacken.kth.se

“Podfuk” (Czech for fiddle), another userfs/PerlFS/ofs equiv —
but this time using Coda. Includes fs-based decompression and
untarring as applications:
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/podfuk/podfuk.html

“AVFS” — “A virtual filesystem” — allows transparent tar,
gzip, zip, bzip2, and rar reading. In C library, not kernel:
http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mszeredi/avfs/

“docfs” — “unified documentation sotrage and retrieval for
Linux systems” — generates documentation on the fly. Sort of like
an automounter for document formats. Appears to have been conceived
in mid-1997, but not implemented:
http://www.on-line.de/~lutz.behnke/docfs/index.html

“devfs” — like Plan9’s filesystem. Basically an alternative to
“special files”:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/kernel-patches.html

http://www.atnf.csiro.au/~rgooch/linux/docs/devfs.txt

The standard for large file access in Unix:
http://www.sas.com/standards/large.file/

The famed reiserfs, based on balanced trees, intended to allow
storage of many small files:
http://idiom.com/~beverly/reiserfs.html

http://devlinux.com/namesys/

Log-structured filesystem projects:
http://collective.cpoint.net/prof/lfs/
— abandoned since 1998-10-02 at least
linux-ljfs-request@majordomo.ibasys.net
— central discussion point
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/czezatke/lfs.html
— appears to be viable, but not yet in beta (by Christian
Czezatke, originally by Adam of Yggdrasil?)

UDF, the DVD-ROM and packet-written CD filesystem:

http://ca.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/10/19/908852708.html

http://trylinux.com/projects/udf/

Global File System, a 64-bit filesystem for shared disks:

http://ma.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/01/28/917557638.html

http://gfs.lcse.umn.edu/
majordomo@lcse.umn.edu”>majordomo@lcse.umn.edu,
body “subscribe gfs-announce” or “subscribe gfs-devel”

Time Capsule Filesystem: intended to be decipherable without a
specification, useful for long-term archival:

http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~boogles/papers/tcfs-thesis/thesis.html

TCFS, the transparent cryptographic filesystem (it talks
NFS):
http://www.globenet.it/~ermmau/tcfs/

http://mikonos.dia.unisa.it/tcfs/

http://tcfs.dia.unisa.it/

http://wwwbs.informatik.htw-dresden.de/svortrag/ai94/Thieme/mytcfs.html
(paper in German)
majordomo@edu-gw.dia.unisa.it
(“subscribe tcfslist” in body)

vs3fs: experimental steganographic filesystem:

http://ca.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/10/10/908004177.html
apparently has become “sfspatch” and “sfstools”:

http://ca.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/03/10/921049985.html

http://www.linux-security.org/sfs/

http://www.leg.uct.ac.za/~carl/vs3fs/

http://www.leg.uct.ac.za/~carl/vs3fs/report.html

cfs: cryptographic filesystem: similar to tcfs. Originally by
Matt Blaze; available from cfs@research.att.com for USians.
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/otherosfs/cfs.html

ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/misc/

ftp://research.att.com/dist/mab/
has information about it.

AtFS, “The Attributed File System” — versioning,
application-defined arbitrary key=value metadata, C-library-based.
Part of “ShapeTools”, a software configuration management
system.
http://www.debian.org.au/Packages/stable/libs/atfs.html

Undelete for ext2fs:
http://amadeus.upr.clu.edu/~undelete/

undelete@amadeus.upr.clu.edu

http://ca.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/10/14/908382417.html

Various foreign filesystems for Linux:

• Mac HFS:
  
  http://tx.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/08/07/902523578.html

  http://www-sccm.stanford.edu/~hargrove/HFS/

• BeOS BFS:
  
  http://tx.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1999/02/15/919099126.html

  http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008030/bfs/

• Windows NT NTFS:
  
  http://tx.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net/appindex/1998/07/04/899562556.html

  http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~loewis/ntfs/

• (Many others, of course, are included in the kernel.)