On Mon, 2012-11-05 at 20:32 +0000, dennisjperk...@comcast.net wrote: > Partitions and filesystems are not identical on Linux/Unix systems. > You carve a drive up into partitions, and you are free to format each > partition with whatever filesystem you want. Every other operating > system I am aware of does not make this distinction. I suppose the > reason is to avoid duplicating the code needed to create a partition > whenever someone creates a new type of filesystem.
They're not identical on *any* operating system, even if a UI layer obscures the differences. And it's got nothing to do with code duplication - it's that they're two quite different concepts. Partitioning is simply a way of splitting one large block device (the actual disk) into smaller pieces that can be used for various purposes. There's no meaning to a partition in itself - it's just a way of saying the first (e.g) 50GB can be used for one thing, and the remaining 200GB can be used for something else. Whereas a filesystem is the usual way of actually using a partition - something at a higher level of the OS knows that that first partition has been formatted to store data in a particular way (e.g an ext4 filesystem). But it doesn't have to be a filesystem - it could be something like swap, which also uses a particular format for it's partitions, but one which has nothing to do with files. Nor do filesystems need to be on partitions - they can be network mounts (SAMBA, NFS), in-memory (procfs, tmpfs), or even a file on another filesystem (e.g a downloaded ISO image). Simon.
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