Top 10 List of Week 03

1. How to Create Partitions in Linux
   In this tutorial, you can learn how to partition or split your hard drive into multiple sections and make each of them act independently. It is useful especially if you install multiple OSes on a single machine. You’ll learn how to list partitions, open storage disk, make a partition table, and create partitions with with command mkpart.

2. Mounting and Unmounting in Linux
   Using mount command is handy in Linux to attach file systems at a specific mount point in the directory tree. On the other hand, unmount is used to detach the mounted file system from the directory tree. Generally, mounting can be used with command “mount [OPTION…] DEVICE_NAME DIRECTORY”.USB files, ISO, and NFS can also be mounted. To unmount, just use “umount DIRECTORY” or “umount DEVICE_NAME”.

3. File Operations in Linux
   File plays a big part in Linux. Learning how to do basic operations on Linux is important to manage files properly and ensure that the files are put in the right directory. Using touch can make a new file, nano for reading and editing a file, and chmod to change the access permission of files.

4. OS Directory Implementation
   Learning data structures like linear list and hash tables did have some benefits. Both of the structures are actually implemented in operating systems to make an appropriate setup for files and directories. In linear list from linked list, each file has a reference to another file in the system, so that everytime a file is made or deleted, it is restructured. For hash table, key and values are made for the files and it is more efficient to search a file using hash functions.

5. Writing FUSE in C
   I want to learn how to make a new filesystem on my own for Linux in my user space. With the power of C that I learned last week, I have an idea to write a structure called fuse_operations and functions like getattr and readdir.

6. Working with tarballs on Linux
   I thought that tarball is like a ball of tar at first. And it is even emphasized when I searched it on Google. But no. Tarballs in Linux is often used to backup files to create an archive, before making changes in the system. I learned how to create and extract files from a tarball.

7. What’s a file attribute?
   Some files are not allowed to be accessed from all programs. File attributes are needed so that some of the files are meant to be read-only, or hidden. We can use chattr in Linux to change file attributes.

8. Linux Filesystem Explained for Beginners
   We can see in this article that Linux has a standard called Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)and it is consistent throughout all Linux distributions. I am amused with Linux’ way of organizing directiories and names of its folders.

9. Free space management in OS
   Disk space is limited, and I learned that disks have to find a way to know how big of free space it’s got and manage it. Like for example, when a file is deleted, the disk needs to allocate the space to the free-space list.

10. Why do we need virtual filesystems?
    I learned that VFS is a shim layer between system calls and implementors of specific file_operations like ext4 and procfs.VFS allows client application to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way.