Difference between DOS and Linux file system?

Answer 1

There are a few differences.

1. In Windows, each seperate filesystem is accessed independently of the other through drive letters. In Linux, each seperate filesystem gets mounted and integrated into one unified filesystem tree.

2. Windows only really supports a few filesystems, primarily NTFS. Linux supports a wide range of filesystems: ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, zfs, jfs, reiserfs, ntfs, etc.

3. Both are capable of supporting loadable filesystem drivers, but Linux has better support for it by far. Also, Linuxhas a filesystem driver called "FUSE" which allows filesystems to be made available through userspace.

4. Linux makes use of pseudofilesystems. Windows doesn't. Because Linux follows the Unix philosophy of everything being a file, Linux can abstract a great deal of things into filesystems, and already does for /dev, /proc, and /sys.

5. Linux core file permissions are more simple but usually more effective than Windows'. The vanilla Linux permissions have three contexts: User, Group, and Others, with three permissions for each: Read, write, and execute. Furthere, three special permissions applied to the file globally, sticky, suid, and guid.

6. Linux has full linking capability, both hard and soft links. Windows has a pretty limted linking capability, bt most users will end up using the "shortcuts" system instead, which is not so capable. With Linux, soft links behave for all intents and purposes as if they *are* the file or directory they point to, meaning even most software apps will make use of them as if they are the real thing, something that cannot be said for Windows shortcuts, which for the most part are almost completely ignored by most software. Finally, a note on hard links: Hard links are different from soft links in that they actually ARE the file itself. Hard links are an actual inode (Filesystem metadata.) reference to the file data itself, virtually indistinguishible from the "original" file. This is not the same as a copy, as a copy actually is that, a copy, where the data is actually duplicated. In this case it quite literally is the file or directing existing in multiple places at the same time on the filesystem. The disadvantage is that hard links do not work across filesystems, largely because an inode cannot really know the contents of another filesystem without a lot of outside help, such as RAID.

7. Windows fragments a lot. Linux hardly fragments unless there's chronic space problems or lots of saving and deleting. This is largely based on how the two operating systems format their filesystems. For the most part, no OS really has the same sort of control over where any data is physically placed on a disk, as the hard disk controller itself, but an OS can influence where the data is placed based on the data structures they specify to the hard disk controller. This problem is far less pronounced in Windows as it used to be, however.

8. Windows doesn't provide any real native loop interfacing with virtual media, such as disk images. Linux does, in the "loop" driver, allowing one to store an entire filesystem in a normal file and mount it as if it were a disk. Windows has third party utilities that can do this, but most of them only support ISO images. This allows Linux to give users handy ways to encrypt and store data in ways Windows can't even begin to approach.

9. Finally, swap space: Windows and Linux approach this in fundamentally different ways. Windows uses a file to store swap data right on the system partition, allowing it to grow and shrink, contributing to overall fragmentation. Linux, on the other hand, Makes an entire partition for swap data. Though in many cases with RAM being as large as it is today and the level in which Linux kees its memory usage down many Linux users don't use swap at all. Linux *can* deploy a swap file like Windows using the loop interface mentioned above, but it's really just better to set aside about 5 GiB of your hard disk to swap (Hard disks are large and cheap, so dedicated swap space is hardly costly to most users.

Answer 2

DOS does not have a "file system" per se. The first version of DOS did not even support directories. Files can be located in any directory.