UNIX's FFS

Back in the days when UNIX was a side project of AT&T and students and faculty at the University of California at Berkeley were modifying AT&T's work, one of the projects undertaken was an improvement of the original UNIX's filesystem. The result was known as the Fast Filesystem (FFS), and it and minor variants of it are still in use today. Although the details differ, FFS closely resembles Linux's ext2fs—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that ext2fs resembles FFS because FFS predates ext2fs. For its day, FFS was quite speedy, but ext2fs is faster for most operations, largely because it does less to ensure the consistency of the filesystem in the event of a crash. FFS is in use today in several UNIX and UNIX-like OSs, including ...

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