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by somat
782 days ago
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A "filesystem" is really just a key:value store, in the unix system the key is hierarchical and each value can have more than one key. The real unix innovation was to combine all such stores present on a system into one tree. The point is to have a nice human accessible address to get your data at. Now, theoretically, all memory access on the system could be done via one simple api. and as plan9 showed most IO can be done via that same api. It is sort of like having all networks be IP or all protocols be HTTP. The implementation may not be ideal but having that narrow waist is a huge quality of life improvement. Realistically, it is only used for items that need to persist outside of a processes run cycle. |
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As in a cartoon I once saw: two cats are talking, and one says of the human they're looking at: "it's a box of electronics, and when he presses buttons on the front, it flashes little coloured lights on that panel at him. It keeps him occupied for hours."
It's true and 100% accurate, but it's not at all precise.
It doesn't matter what kind of store it is. What matters is that it is an indirection mechanism designed for computers which were unable to access large amounts of directly-addressible non-volatile store.
Computers no longer suffer from this restriction, but all current OSes are built around this abstraction, and it cripples them.