When doing a fresh install there is generall very little that you need to do in regard to installing a filesystem. Most of the work is done for you. All you really need to do is choose the filesystem(s) you want to use. However, for many people (newbies and experienced users alike), which file system to choose it not always clear-cut.
In the section on supported filesystems, we talk about some of the various filesystem types and what things to consider when choosing one over the other.
If you expect that you are going to have a large number of files on your
systems (like hundreds of thousands or millions), then you will need to increase
the number of inodes. Basically, inodes are pointers to the data on the disk,
as well as contain information about the file such as the file owner, permissions
and so on. In most cases, you are limited by the number of
Generically, filesystems are created using using the mkfs
command. One of the options it takes is the filesystem type. The basically
tells mkfs to start the real program which then creates the filesystem.
For example, the mke2fs is called when create an ext2fs.
When calling
mkfs, you typically have few options. So if you need to specify the
number of
One interesting thing about the ReiserFS is that inode are allocated dynamically. That means you will only run out of indode when you run out of space on the disk.
Examples of mkfs commands are:
Filesystem | Command |
EXT2 FS | mkfs.ext2 |
EXT4 FS | mkfs.ext3 |
SCO BFS | mkfs.bfs |
Minix FS | mkfs.minix |
DOS (FAT) FS | mkfs.msdos |
Virtual FAT FS | mkfs.vfat |
XFS | mkfs.xfs |
XIA FS | mkfs.xiafs |
A list of supported filesystem types can be found in the here. and the section on file system tools.
By default all of these reside in the /sbin directory. If we do an to get the inode number, as well, we end up with something like this:
Note that both mkfs.ext2 and mkfs.ext3 both have the same inode number and are thus the exact same program. This makes sense since the ext3fs is just an extension of the ext3fs.s
In it’s simplest form, you can usually run the appropriate mkfs command and pass it just the name of the partition, without any option. For example, if we wanted to create and ext3fs, we could do it like this:
This gives us an output like this:
Note that the very first line indicates that the program called is mke2fs, although we started it as mkfs.ext3. If we were to start it as mkfs.ext2, the output would be the same except that you would not have the line:
This is quite simply because the ext2fs is not a journalling filesystem where the ext3fs is. If were ran mkfs.ext2 a said we wanted a journalling filesystem (using the option) the output would be the same.
Note that the program created 10 copied of the superblock. Each being an exact copy of the other. The superblock contains information about the type of file system, its size, how many data blocks there are, the number of free inodes, free space available, and where the inode table is. Detail can be found in the section on disk layout.
Details on checking the file system can be found in the section on filesystem tools.