File System
Hi Guys,
What is VFS in Linux based OS or UNIX filesystem?
B/R,
Saptarshi.
Responses
Guru
9710 points
Hi Saptarshi,
VFS means Virtual File System - find more information on Wikipedia : Virtual File System
Also, technical details from the Linux Documentation Project : Virtual Filesystem (VFS)
Another source (from M. Tim Jones) : Anatomy of the Linux virtual file system switch
Regards,
Christian
Red Hat
Guru
7257 points
More simply, VFS is an API which lets developers easily write a new filesystem driver for Linux.
VFS defines file and directory "operations" like open, close, read, write, etc.
To add a new filesystem to Linux, a filesystem just has to write its own set of those standard operations.
Community Member
32 points
With Unix systems, it's actually the kernel interface to a FS (treating the FS a bit like a driver, with a standardised interface). It's key is the vnode structure, which is the kernel's representation of a file or directory (or FIFO, SOCK etc) - basically the in-core abstraction of the inode structure stored on the disk. System V documentation used in-core and on-disk inodes, just to confuse you.
I've noticed that the Linux kernel calls it's version of a vnode "struct inode". Microsofties call the same thing an "Installable FS". And FUSE allows user-space applications to interface to the kernel back-end vnode (struct inode) layer.
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