50 Years in Filesystems: 1984

This is part 2 of a series. The first part is “1974 ”. Progress is sometimes hard to see, especially when you have been part of it or otherwise lived through it. Often, it is easier to see if you compare modern educational material, and the problems discussed with older material. And then look for the research papers and sources that fueled the change. In Linux (and Unix in general), this is easy. The original Unix filesystem was doing well, but also had a large number of obvious problems. BSD Unix undertook an effort to fix them, and this is documented in the book “The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System ” by Leffler, McKusick et. al. A more concise, but also more academic discussion can be found in the classic 1984 paper A Fast File System for UNIX , which lists Marshall McKusick, Bill Joy (then at Sun), Samuel Leffler (then at LucasFilm) and Robert Fabry as authors. The paper promises a reimplementation of the Unix filesystem for higher throughput, bett ... Read full article.