MINIX file system
| Developer(s) | Open Source Community |
|---|---|
| Full name | MINIX file system version 3 |
| Introduced | 1987 with MINIX 1.0 |
| Partition identifier | 0x81 (MBR) |
| Features | |
| Dates recorded | last metadata change, last file change, last file access |
| Date resolution | 1s |
| File system permissions | POSIX |
| Transparent compression | No |
| Transparent encryption | No (provided at the block device level) |
| Other | |
| Supported operating systems | MINIX 3, Linux and HelenOS |
The MINIX file system is the native file system of the MINIX operating system.
MINIX was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in the 1980s, as a Unix-like operating system whose source code could be used freely in education. The MINIX file system was designed for use with MINIX; it copies the basic structure of the Unix File System but avoids any complex features in the interest of keeping the source code clean, clear and simple, to meet the overall goal of MINIX to be a useful teaching aid.
When Linus Torvalds first started writing his Linux operating system kernel (1991), he was working on a machine running MINIX, and adopted its file system layout. This soon proved problematic, since MINIX restricted filename lengths to fourteen characters (thirty in later versions), it limited partitions to 64 megabytes, and the file system was designed for teaching purposes, not performance. The Extended file system (ext; April 1992) was developed to replace MINIX's, but it was only with the second version of this, ext2, that Linux obtained a commercial-grade file system. As of 1994, the MINIX file system was "scarcely in use" among Linux users.
A MINIX file system has six components:
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