5 The Filesystem
Quick: which of the following would you expect to find in a “filesystem”?
• Processes
• Serial ports
• Interprocess communication channels
• Shared memory segments
If the system is UNIX, the answer is “all of the above.” And yes, you might find some files in there, too.
While the basic purpose of a filesystem is to represent and organize the system’s storage resources, programmers have been eager to avoid reinventing the wheel when it comes to managing other types of objects. Frequently, it has proven to be natural and convenient to map such objects into the filesystem namespace. There are some advantages to this unification ...
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