OS/2's HPFS

OS/2's High Performance Filesystem (HPFS) was developed for OS/2 1.2 as the successor to FAT. HPFS abandoned the FAT concept for a more UNIX-like approach using inodes (called fnodes in HPFS), free space bitmaps, and so on. The filesystem also incorporates native support for OS/2 EAs. It was designed to be fault-tolerant and to work well with large hard disks (at least, large by the standards of the mid 1980s). It organizes data in 8MB bands, each of which contains a free space bitmap for that band and additional metadata. Because of this organization, the allocation block size for HPFS remains constant no matter what the partition size. The allocation block size is normally set to 0.5KB.

HPFS's features include the following:

Get The Multi-Boot Configuration Handbook now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.