Re: Linux file system

[Tracy Nelson <tnelson@fast.net>]

Steven J. Pulito wrote:

> I've heard that there is no need to defrag a linux hard drive because the
> file system does it automatically.  Could someone verify this and possibly
> elaborate on the technical details?

Disclaimer: I haven't really studied ext2fs, but I implemented the UNIX
V7 filesystem (in Pascal!) once.

Basically, the filesystem is just a long string of blocks.  When the
filesystem is created, all these blocks are in a big linked list known
as the free space list.  You allocate blocks from one end of this list
and when you free blocks they are appended to the other.  One
optimization the free routine can do is to see if the blocks being freed
are adjacent to some other free blocks.  If so, then instead of linking
them to the end of the list, they are linked right after the free blocks
to which they are adjacent.  This creates a larger chunk of contiguous
free space, which is always handy.  Of course, this doesn't handle the
problem of files being split into multiple chunks, so I don't know if
ext2fs handles this, or if _read() is smart enough to pre-fetch during
idle I/O, or what.

Cheers!
-- Tracy Nelson

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