Top 10 List of Week 03

This week’s topic is about files, file systems, and FUSE. These links are mostly about files and file system, as I couldn’t find many about FUSE. But there’s one about it at the end. These are my findings, in no particular order~

1. Crash Course on Files & File Systems
   This video provides an overview about the key principles of file systems. As I learn from this video, the file system is the part of operating system that manages and keeps track of files. The video itself is very compact and great as both overview AND review material.

2. Inside the Mac Filesystem
   Continuing on my file system journey, this is a video on Mac’s file system. It turns out to be quite different than the ones Microsoft’s Windows used. Apple hides a lot of files from the eyes, but almost every file behind an application is accessible and can be browsed by the file explorer. I find this interesting, as I never used MacOS myself.

3. Different Kinds of File Systems
   I never knew there was more than one kind of file system. This video mentioned a lot of file system names that I’ve never heard before. According to the presenter, it turns out that the file system that Microsoft uses are not the best. Right now, I can’t really tell the difference because I never looked it up, but having learned that there’s a lot more to learn out there makes me a little curious.

4. Windows File Systems as Fast as Possible
   This time, it’s all about Windows’ file systems. Most of them has FAT in their names, which I find a bit quirky. The video provides some sort of timeline/history about almost every file system that Windows’ used. It’s a quick watch, and I watched it in 2x speed so it’s even faster. :D

5. About Linux Tarballs, Archive, and Compress Folders
   I got curious when W03’s assignment had us download some kind of .tar file and decrypt it locally. I learned that tarball is some kind of file compression method. When we want to transport a folder consisting of several files, we can generate a tarball, which is one solid file containing all the data from the folder aforementioned, and this is the file that we can send. As the tar file gets decrypted, we can get the initial folder and have everything in there. Like magic!

6. Crash Course about Compression
   As I learned about tarball and its main function to compress files, I got curious about file compression in general. I found this video about file compression, and it demonstrates several file compression techniques. One of them is called lossless compression, because the decompressed data is identical to the original before compression. File compression is amazing! You get essentially the same thing but in smaller file size.

7. More on Compression
   This is another video about compression, this time by Computerphile. It says that compression is reducing the amount of information, but without losing any of it. It takes advantage of repeatability and predictability. Some time in the end of the video, they also talk a little about information theory, which will tell you what’s called the entropy limit. At this point they decided to cut the video and continue the discussion in another one. So, off I go to watch that second part of the video~

8. Entropy in Compression
   This is the continuation of the previous video, talking about the entropy in compression. It answers the question of how far can you compress without losing any information. The professor demonstrates this with sending to bits of information to indicate the weather in San Francisco to his friend in Rhino. The explanation is very clear, but there were some math involved so I’m not going to recite everything here.

9. Creating a File System
   I found this video while browsing for the other ones. It demonstrates the creation of a file system in linux. We need the command mkfs to create a new file system. I also learned that you can make different type of file system on different disk partition. It’s a very interesting demo.

10. File Systems in User Space - FUSE
    As I couldn’t find any video explaining what FUSE is, I looked up an article about it and found this link. Quoted from the article, “File Systems in User Space (FUSE) is a framework in which a kernel component interacts with an application program and presents it to applications so that it looks much like a file system.” It addresses some of the challenges of building a file system, and it’s essentially an interface. I don’t quite grasp the concept yes, except that it’s some sort of framework or interface to build file systems.

That’s it for my GSGS journey about file systems (and FUSE, but mostly files and file systems) this week. I hope these links will be useful to anyone who chooses to click on them.

Have a great week, and see you on the next one~