Fast File Systems

Goals

• Enhancing performance
• Reducing fragmentation
• Improving reliability
• Supporting larger file systems

Improvements and Innovations

Block size optimization

• Larger block sizes
• Reduce overhead of managing file metadata

Cylinder groups

• Organizing disk blocks into cylinder groups to improve locality and reduce seek times
• Made of one or more consecutive cylinders on a disk

Metadata Optimization

• Using a more efficient format for storing metadata like inodes and directories
• Leading to faster access and reduced overhead

Keep inode close to data blocks
Try to allocate consecutive inodes for files in same directory
Each cylinder group had its own bitmap for available blocks
Bookkeeping information stored scattered so that it will not all be lost