Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system.

When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems.

You've probably heard of Journaling Flash File System (JFFS) and Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS), but do you know what it means to have a file system that assumes an underlying flash device?

You've probably heard of Journaling Flash File System (JFFS) and Yet Another Flash File System (YAFFS), but do you know what it means to have a file system that assumes an underlying flash device?

Linux Mint 10 is the first version of Linux Mint with built-in support for the B-tree File System (btrfs). Btrfs is one of the newest file systems in the Linux kernel.

The default journaling file system on non-boot partitions on Ubuntu 11.04 is ext4. Other journaling file systems supported are ext3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs, and btrfs. The journaling file system of interest in this article is btrfs, the B-Tree File System. Btrfs is an ongoing attempt to create a ZFS-like file system for Linux.

Diving deeper into UnionFS: walking through how to create and manage large file systems using the principles of ChunkFS and UnionFS.

In keeping with our current theme of cool user-space file systems, this article examines the first user-space file system I ever used: SSHFS. SSHFS has a client that can mount and interact with a remote file system as though the file system were local. It uses sftp so it’s as secure as sftp is (I’m not a security expert so I can’t comment on the security of ssh).

CentOS 6 now includes eCryptfs which provides the ability to encrypt data and files on a per-file basis instead of the entire disk as in block encryption. The eCryptfs system sits on top of the current file system to provide the encryption layer, that is why it is known as the pseudo-file system.