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> Right now, the file system is more than just a data storage layer, it's also a set of concepts (files, directories, etc) with which the user interacts through

• icebraining 13y ago
  A filesystem is an API for making system calls to deal with data access on storage devices. Yes, and that API involves certain core concepts, like files (and usually directories), which are exposed to the user. You open files, you save them, you copy them. The UI semantics are almost a 1:1 mapping of the base API. It isn't necessary for a filesystem to have the concepts of directories or even files. Look at Plan9 for instance. I don't get your last point; Fossil has both, and as far as I know, the whole core of Plan9 is that everything is a file, achieving what UNIX couldn't. And how can a filesystem not have files? The very definition of the word implies the storage and/or retrieval of files. There are other data stores which don't depend on a concept of files (e.g., RDBMSs), but they aren't filesystems. The word "filesystem" is being overloaded to mean somethng more general than what it means in an operating system discussion. I disagree; the author is talking about the filesystem, as it's exposed to the user. Sure, it's not the layer we usually talk about, but it's the same base concept.