No. I'm pointing out that "the arrangement of blocks on a disk" is not
what makes a file system. Why is the pipe system not a file system? How
about FIFOs? How about unix-domain sockets? Are those file systems, or
parts thereof? How about sockets, or Ameoba's file servers, or NFS? What
about Eros, where all files are stored in memory?
"Filesystem" is an API abstraction to access persistent store. That's
probably as concise and specific a definition as I can make.
So IF I were a programmer working on lets say a digital camera and I chose to
arrange the picture data in the FAT16 format and wrote my own code to do it,
does that mean I am not using FAT16 as I am not using an API call???
I would disagree that no OS construct has anything to do with the definition of
any "Filesystem"
You can put in any filesystem even though I picked FAT16, I picked it as its
overly documented at this point in time and is read/writen to natively by most
current OS's, and a few very dead ones.
Pipes, FIFO's, unix-domain sockets, and network sockets are generally not
considered filesystems because they lack persistence. They *are* considered
streams.
So if i allocate space in memory format it FAT16, and use it just like a hard
drive, I am doing what??? Is that a stream also? it lacks pereistence. If the
power goes out, the changes I made are gone... and whats this "generally not
considered filesystems" is it a filesystem or not, who decides, and who made
them king of filesystems?
Richard Reynolds
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