Writing data to disk, how hard can it be? File systems are a special topic, because when you make a mistake, somebody is losing data and rollback ain't gonna fix it.

We have had innovations in filesystems roughly in intervals of a decade for the last 50 years. What have we learned, what has changed due to changes in technology, and where are we now?

A tour of the V7 Unix file system, BSD FFS, SGI XFS, LFS and ZFS, and some remarks on modern environments. A technical tour of how we store data in Unix.

Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

about this event: https://programm.froscon.org/2025/events/3238.html