- Links to files and devices

- Avoid copying files

- Links can be created in same directory or different directories
- Conveniently access files
- To most programs linking is invisible and they treat links the same as
original files
- Links take up only minimal disk space
- Just enough to create a directory entry for the file
- There are two types of links
- Links (hard links)
- Data associated with files persists until last linked file is deleted
- Symbolic links (soft links or symlinks)
- If source file is deleted the symlinks are orphaned
- Links are created using the ln command
- Ln original.txt link.txt
- Ln -s makes a symbolic link
- Windows can also support junction links
- Specific for directories
- Honors reparse points in Windows
- Kernel modules
- Essentially integrate into Linux when they are loaded
- Pretty much become part of OS
- Must rely on services provided by OS
- Cannot use standard c/c++ API
- Require a new set of APIs
- Development and management is tedious
- Require super user (su) privileges to manage
- Module crashed are often fatal to the whole system
- Kernel can recover from some issues
- User-space drivers
- Current linux trend is to migrate modules into user-space
- Modules run as regular user programs rather than kernel
- Use special system calls and support from kernel
- Advantages
- Run on a per user basis
- Safer and more secure
- Easier to develop using standard APIs and any available library
- Disadvantage
- Each user must run module to use device
- Movement of large volumes of data may be slow
- File System in User Space (FUSE)
- Allows users to set up and use custom file systems
- Uses a special kernel module to perform operations
- What is a file system
 - A standard or convention used to store information on permanent storage
- A “data structure” on disk
- Includes organization of data
- File system designs depend on number of factors
- Size oof physical media
- Application requirements
- Number of reads, writes, deletes
- Operating environment
- How much safety and security is really needed
- Examples:
- FAT
- NTFS
- EXT
- EXT3
- AFS
- Goal of a file system
- Physical storage
- Read and write to them
- The root directory is a fixed location on storage
- Part of storage is dedicated to the root directory
- Contains information about the top-level files on the storage
- Contains attributes for each file
- Block allocation entries (inodes)
- File systems maintain allocation table
- Block allocation tables are stored on disk
- Track free space (with 0 entry) on storage
- Track the next logical block of a file
- This is essentially a linked list on disk
- FAT: File Allocation table
- Simple file system that organizes storage into the following distinct parts based
on clusters
- Boot sector (Sector 0)
- Spinning storage
- Hard disk drives have many platters or surfaces
- Each surface has many concentric cylinders
- Each surface has one or more read-write heads that move horizontally to
read data off the cylinders
- Initially disks have to be formatted to mark start and stop of sectors
- Logical Sector Numbers
- A physical sector is identified by 3 values
- Head, cylinder, physical sector number
- Referring to sectors with 3 values is cumbersome
- Given track, head, and sector
- lsn= ((track * #heads) + head) * #sectorsPerTrack + sector -1
- BPB is a critical data structure in FAT
- Contains information about the file system , such as:
- Sector size (in bytes)
- Number of FAT copies on floppy
- Number of root directory entires
- BPB is stored in binary form starting at offset 0 in the Boot Sector(sector 0)
- Binary formats make is easier to read and process
- Uses little endian format that is fully compatible with x86 architecture
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