[ Thanks to Robert McMillan for this link. ]
“Whenever I sit down at an unfamiliar computer system for the first time, the first thing I do is run the df command. I like to get a feel for the landscape of that system, so to speak, before I proceed to explore it further. This makes sense to me since managing the filesystem is always a central area of concern for any system administrator. The basic tasks related to filesystems are simple and familiar to almost everyone: managing and mounting filesystems, performing simple filesystem consistency checks with fsck, and the like. This month, I delve deeper into this topic, discussing other tools for managing and manipulating filesystems, and describing the process for adding a new disk or partition.”
“Linux supports a very large number of filesystems for local disk partitions (in addition to several others that can be used to access remote disks via the network). You can determine which of these are supported in the currently running Linux kernel by examining the contents of the /proc/filesystems file.”
“Adding kernel support for any of these filesystems is quite easy and may be done by selecting the corresponding configuration options when building a new kernel. For example, if you use makexconfig, then you can simply select the desired filesystem type within its Filesystems category. If you need support for a filesystem type because you want to move a disk from another environment onto a Linux system, be aware that you will also need to enable the appropriate partition type (via the Partition Types category) if the disk’s original operating- system environment uses a different partition-table format from the one that Linux uses.”