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Is File system a software?

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hack3rcon
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Is File system a software?

#1 Post by hack3rcon »

Hello,
According to the Wikipedia, a File system is:
A file system or filesystem controls how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stops and the next begins
But is it a software that format the HDD and fencing it?

Thank you.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#2 Post by Bloom »

A storage medium like a hdd or sdd begins with a partition table. A program like Gparted is used for that, mostly during the installation process of Debian but it can be started (needs root access) on an already installed system as well.
After one or more partitions are made, they need to formatted to establish a file system on the partition. You need a formatting program for that. Gparted can do that as well.
Once the formatting is done, you have a new file system. To use it, it needs to be mounted. Many desktop environments mount file systems automatically as soon as they appear on the system. If not, Gparted can also mount it for you.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#3 Post by cuckooflew »

Yes, you can use gparted, to partition and format the drive, but it is not the only method, 'fdisk'/ 'mkfs' , '
'parted' https://packages.debian.org/buster/parted, and FreeDos is also a good tool/OS for formatting, thise are a few of the many methods, you DO NOT have to have any DE, to do these things , the drive can be mounted, using the 'mount' command,
And no, the file system is NOT software,..
What is software ? https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?qu ... sion=1.3.0
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Re: Is File system a software?

#4 Post by tynman »

The term "file system" in computers (at least in Linux) is ambiguous.

It has a generic meaning to describe the design approach taken to organize data on a given partition (physical or logical), e.g.,
  • BTRFS
    EXTx
    FAT
    ZFS
    BTRFS
    NTFS
With this meaning, I would say these refer to the software used to organize the data stored on a partition.

On the other hand, the term is often used to refer to some collection of storage which may or may not be mounted. The "collection of storage" may be a partition on a hard drive, but it may also be a logical partition comprised of a collection of who-knows-what across a number of hard drives, as provided by something like mdadm or a network storage system. The storage will have been formatted using a given "file system" (such as EXT4), but after that the storage itself it then referred to as a file system, and which may be displayed in Linux using the df command. In this use of the term, it refers to a specific piece of storage and it is clearly not software.

Maybe I'm the only one who finds this confusing. (For some time, it annoyed me. Eventually I realized that resistance would be futile.)

neuraleskimo
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Re: Is File system a software?

#5 Post by neuraleskimo »

Here a few staples of computer science in the 1990's ;-).

* UNIX Internals by Vahalia
* Operating Systems Concepts by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne
* Distributed Operating Systems by Tanenbaum

They still make good references and you can probably find cheap used copies or find them in your local library. These will go into quite some depth on filesystems.

Good luck!

morse_the_horse
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Re: Is File system a software?

#6 Post by morse_the_horse »

A filesystem is a physical (or logical) organization of data. Just like a manual file system you might create at home to organize your bills and correspondence. It is not software. Once you design your file system (something as simple as organizing by correspondent name, by date or whatever), you have created only the design. Then you need some way to set it up (labels, etc) so you can search it for, say, the electric bill from last month. In the case of a computer filesystem, you select from a preset list of alternative file system types (all of which have their own advantages and disadvantages) for which software has been developed by others. Using that software, you create the layout, the labels, the links between labels, the designated locations for these and the data, a method for identifying free space, sizes of data blocks and files, etc. The canned software in the operating system thus sets this all up automatically although it can be tweaked or modified by you at setup or later. Most users just simply take defaults but may extend or decrease the size of the overall file system at creation or later.
Once the initial setup is done, software programs, knowing the layout of information by knowing the type of filesystem plus by reading data in a known location giving information about the intricacies of the specific locations and sizes, take care of telling the operating system where to read, write and update all the parameters. The operating system then handles the physical transfer of data. All these programs are provided for you.
If you want to create your own filesystem type, you can do so but have to learn how to create the software to do the above.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#7 Post by tdave »

I think you can think of a file system like css. it basically controls your software. while software issues your commands, the file system organizes it and presents it in a way you can understand it and use it. back in the window 95 days, before css. the way to learn html was to find a website you liked and download it. Then you could study it and learn how it was done. So a lot of web programmers would build there sight and then remove the white spaces. beginners could still use it to learn from but it took more effort. the file system is like that. but really I think it is more so. because a file system starts with a kernal? which changes X and 0 to alphabet?

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Re: Is File system a software?

#8 Post by CwF »

Yes, it is software.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#9 Post by Bloom »

No it is NOT. Software is a program consisting of computer instructions. A file system is created and maintained by software, but it is not software. You could compare it to data, although a file system is used to store data. You best look at a file system like a filing cabinet and each drawer is a directory and each card in a drawer is a file.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#10 Post by CwF »

There is a program. If that program is dynamically stored on some read-write mechanism, runtime adaptable, it is software. If that same program is then taken from its software state and committed to a static state, perhaps a chip not interactive at runtime, it is firmware. If that same program is permanently committed to silicone, never to be modded again, it is hardware. Every bit of code ever ran on a computer was at some point software. Much of that could be sent to code purgatory and live as firmware in the only ambiguous state. Much of it could be cast as hardware.

To me 'software' is a state, not a unique or rigid category.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#11 Post by Bloom »

It doesn't matter how and where software is stored, it is in fact still software although we can call it differently - like firmware. A file system, however, is not software in any form or shape. It is created and maintained by software, but is no software itself.

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Re: Is File system a software?

#12 Post by cuckooflew »

Wow, I never dreamed there were so many definitions of software,... I think I will just stick with what the wiki says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software
Software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other uses, see Software (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Softwear.
"Networked" redirects here. For the 2012 book, see Networked: The New Social Operating System.
Computer software, or simply software, is a collection of data or computer instructions that tell the computer how to work. This is in contrast to physical hardware, from which the system is built and actually performs the work. In computer science and software engineering, computer software is all information processed by computer systems, programs and data. Computer software includes computer programs, libraries and related non-executable data, such as online documentation or digital media. Computer hardware and software require each other and neither can be realistically used on its own.

At the lowest programming level,[clarification needed] executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). A machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed to "jump" to a different instruction, or is interrupted by the operating system. As of 2015, most personal computers, smartphone devices and servers have processors with multiple execution units or multiple processors performing computation together, and computing has become a much more concurrent activity than in the past.

The majority of software is written in high-level programming languages. They are easier and more efficient for programmers because they are closer to natural languages than machine languages.[1] High-level languages are translated into machine language using a compiler or an interpreter or a combination of the two. Software may also be written in a low-level assembly language, which has strong correspondence to the computer's machine language instructions and is translated into machine language using an assembler.
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Re: Is File system a software?

#13 Post by cuckooflew »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system
File system
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This article is about the way computers organise data stored on media such as disk. For library and office filing systems, see Library classification.
In computing, a file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) controls how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of data stops and the next begins. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the data is easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way paper-based data management system is named, each group of data is called a "file." The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of data and their names is called a "file system."

There are many different kinds of file systems. Each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size and more. Some file systems have been designed to be used for specific applications. For example, the ISO 9660 file system is designed specifically for optical discs.

File systems can be used on numerous different types of storage devices that use different kinds of media. As of 2019, hard disk drives have been key storage devices and are projected to remain so for the foreseeable future.[1] Other kinds of media that are used include SSDs, magnetic tapes, and optical discs. In some cases, such as with tmpfs, the computer's main memory (random-access memory, RAM) is used to create a temporary file system for short-term use.

Some file systems are used on local data storage devices;[2] others provide file access via a network protocol (for example, NFS,[3] SMB, or 9P clients). Some file systems are "virtual", meaning that the supplied "files" (called virtual files) are computed on request (such as procfs and sysfs) or are merely a mapping into a different file system used as a backing store. The file system manages access to both the content of files and the metadata about those files. It is responsible for arranging storage space; reliability, efficiency, and tuning with regard to the physical storage medium are important design considerations.
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Re: Is File system a software?

#14 Post by Islander »

IMHO, "file system" can mean

* A standard for organising data on a disk into files. Eg, ext4 is a file system, NTFS is a file system, FAT is a file system.

* The software you use for reading and writing that data. Eg, "The ext3 file system in the new kernel is buggy"

* A particular region of a disk that uses a certain file system. Eg, "I mounted one ext4 file system on /mnt/a, and another on /mnt/b"

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Re: Is File system a software?

#15 Post by RU55EL »

Bloom wrote:It doesn't matter how and where software is stored, it is in fact still software although we can call it differently - like firmware. A file system, however, is not software in any form or shape. It is created and maintained by software, but is no software itself.
Isn't the software that controls and maintains the data files on the hard drive part of the "file system"? Ext3 is a journaling file system. It is active in and of itself, maintaining and journaling the files using software. Is that software not part of the "file sysem."

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Re: Is File system a software?

#16 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Thread locked.

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