Diffuse is a graphical tool for comparing and merging text files. It can work with many revision control systems as a diff viewer or merge tool. Diffuse is able to compare an arbitrary number of files side-by-side (n-way merge), and gives the user the ability to manually correct line matching and directly edit the files.

How should one allocate disk space for a file for later writing? ftruncate() (or lseek() followed by write()) create sparse files, not what is needed. A traditional way is to write zeroes to the file till it reaches the desired file size. Doing things this way has a few drawbacks...

You often may need to compare one version of a file to an earlier one or check one file against a reference file. Linux provides several tools for doing this, depending on how deep a comparison you need to make.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

In our previous Part 1 of this series we looked at the IOzone performance for ext3, ext4, and reiser4 using larger size record lengths (1MB, 4MB, 8MB, 16MB). In this article the number of file systems is extended to add most of the major file systems in Linux, even the experimental ones. This article adds ext2, jfs, xfs, btrfs, and reiserfs.

A journey through the file systems history and how we get from CP/M to ZFS. It talks about Free Software and Proprietary file systems such as ext3, ReiserFS, HFS+, NTFS, etc.

Linux, being the chameleon that it is, has the ability to support many different file systems, either natively or with “outside” help. Besides its native ext2 (and more recently ext3) file system, it can also handle DOS’ FAT16 and FAT32, Windows’ NTFS4 and NTFS5, OS/2’s HPFS, and Macintosh’s HFS, just to name a few.

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.

More performance: We add five file systems to our previous benchmark results to creating a “uber” article on metadata file system performance. We follow the “good” benchmarking guidelines presented in a previous article and examine the good, the bad and the interesting.