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Practical File System Design with the Be File System
Dominic Giampaolo Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers ProductGroup: Book Binding: Paperback  File Formats
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ASIN: 1558604979 |
Book Description
This is the new guide to the design and implementation of file systems in general, and the Be File System (BFS) in particular. This book covers all topics related to file systems, going into considerable depth where traditional operating systems books often stop. Advanced topics are covered in detail such as journaling, attributes, indexing and query processing. Built from scratch as a modern 64 bit, journaled file system, BFS is the primary file system for the Be Operating System (BeOS), which was designed for high performance multimedia applications.
You do not have to be a kernel architect or file system engineer to use Practical File System Design. Neither do you have to be a BeOS developer or user. Only basic knowledge of C is required. If you have ever wondered about how file systems work, how to implement one, or want to learn more about the Be File System, this book is all you will need.
* Review of other file systems, including Linux ext2, BSD FFS, Macintosh HFS, NTFS and SGI's XFS.
* Allocation policies for placing data on disks and discussion of on-disk data structures used by BFS
* How to implement journaling
* How a disk cache works, including cache interactions with the file system journal
* File system performance tuning and benchmarks comparing BFS, NTFS, XFS, and ext2
* A file system construction kit that allows the user to experiment and create their own file systems
Customer Reviews:
Online Copy Available.......2004-02-21
Decent survey of ideas, needs more breadth, depth, clarity.......2000-08-26
Perhaps the most annoying thing about this book though is that he doesn't finish his thoughts. I felt that often, just as he was getting to the interesting part after cutting through the fluffy descriptions of his design choices, he would leave the topic and not come back. The must frustrating part of this was that after skipping over many pertinent details of how he actually built the BeFS, he spends an excruciating amount of time describing the vnode layer and the exact API that the file system driver must write too -- something I feel would have been better left to a Be-specific API programming manual.
The editing could have used some help. Grammar and flow were pretty good, the book was readable. However, the author too often finished discussions by saying, "we didn't have time." This is annoying and gets old.
Also annoying was the repetion of some lines of thought unecessarily. For instance, he talks about B+ trees and then instead of finishing the conversation, wanders away and talks about something else, and then wanders back and repeats himself before continuing.
Overall organization was a little sloppy, with summary after summary of what was just discussed or what will be discussed next. Focus was also affected by the author's understandable tendency to spend too much time describing the minute details of this or that "tricky" implementation issue that he encountered while build his piece of the BeOS. Obviously he is proud of his accomplishments, and he should be, but I felt the subtle back-patting going on at various points in the book's explanations complicated them unnecessarily with testaments to the author's debugging and optimization skill, rather than providing a complete road-map and "beware" warnings to feature implementors. As I've already pointed out, the book doesn't have enough detail to implement something from, so it's kind of awkward for these very complete descriptions of certain types of problems to be present in the text.
I thought the "summary" sections at the end of the chapters were too creampuff to be useful -- I didn't pay for Cliffs' Notes in my book.
Overall, a reasonably worthwhile purchase, especially given the derth of material in this area, but there are more technical, better explained resources on the net that should also be consulted for more info about file system design.
Decent survey of ideas, needs more breadth, depth, clarity.......2000-08-26
Perhaps the most annoying thing about this book though is that he doesn't finish his thoughts. I felt that often, just as he was getting to the interesting part after cutting through the fluffy descriptions of his design choices, he would leave the topic and not come back. The must frustrating part of this was that after skipping over many pertinent details of how he actually built the BeFS, he spends an excruciating amount of time describing the vnode layer and the exact API that the file system driver must write too -- something I feel would have been better left to a Be-specific API programming manual.
The editing could have used some help. Grammar and flow were pretty good, the book was readable. However, the author too often finished discussions by saying, "we didn't have time." This is annoying and gets old.
Also annoying was the repetion of some lines of thought unecessarily. For instance, he talks about B+ trees and then instead of finishing the conversation, wanders away and talks about something else, and then wanders back and repeats himself before continuing.
Overall organization was a little sloppy, with summary after summary of what was just discussed or what will be discussed next. Focus was also affected by the author's understandable tendency to spend too much time describing the minute details of this or that "tricky" implementation issue that he encountered while build his piece of the BeOS. Obviously he is proud of his accomplishments, and he should be, but I felt the subtle back-patting going on at various points in the book's explanations complicated them unnecessarily with testaments to the author's debugging and optimization skill, rather than providing a complete road-map and "beware" warnings to feature implementors. As I've already pointed out, the book doesn't have enough detail to implement something from, so it's kind of awkward for these very complete descriptions of certain types of problems to be present in the text.
I thought the "summary" sections at the end of the chapters were too creampuff to be useful -- I didn't pay for Cliffs' Notes in my book.
Overall, a reasonably worthwhile purchase, especially given the derth of material in this area, but there are more technical, better explained resources on the net that should also be consulted for more info about file system design.
the Big Picture and the specifics.......2000-04-26
I wish every technical writer were this good........2000-03-21
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