Filesystems in the Linux kernel

This under-development manual will, some glorious day, provide comprehensive information on how the Linux virtual filesystem (VFS) layer works, along with the filesystems that sit below it. For now, what we have can be found below.

Core VFS documentation

See these manuals for documentation about the VFS layer itself and how its algorithms work.

• Pathname lookup
  • Introduction to pathname lookup
  • RCU-walk - faster pathname lookup in Linux
  • A walk among the symlinks
• Linux Filesystems API summary
  • The Linux VFS
  • The proc filesystem
  • Events based on file descriptors
  • The Filesystem for Exporting Kernel Objects
  • The debugfs filesystem
• splice and pipes
  • splice API
  • pipes API

Filesystem support layers

Documentation for the support code within the filesystem layer for use in filesystem implementations.

• The Linux Journalling API
  • Overview
  • Data Types
  • Functions
  • See also
• Filesystem-level encryption (fscrypt)
  • Introduction
  • Threat model
  • Key hierarchy
  • Encryption modes and usage
  • User API
  • Access semantics
  • Encryption policy enforcement
  • Implementation details

Filesystem-specific documentation

Documentation for individual filesystem types can be found here.

• The Android binderfs Filesystem
  • Mounting binderfs
  • Options
  • Allocating binder Devices
  • Deleting binder Devices