One of the last things the Linux kernel does during system boot is mount the root filesystem. The Linux kernel dictates no filesystem structure, but user space applications expect to find files with ...

There was a time when, to use a computer, you merely turned it on and were greeted by a command prompt. Nowadays, most operating systems offer a security model with multiple users. Typically, the ...

During the booting of Solaris, both the / and /usr file systems are mounted read-only and then later, before the boot process is fully complete, remounted read-write. This is all part of the normal ...

Linux has changed. Originally inspired by Unix, there were certain well understood but not well enforced rules that everyone understood. Programs did small things and used pipes to communicate. X ...

Configuration is the first step in building a kernel. There are many ways and various options to choose from. The kernel will generate a .config file at the end of the process and generate a series of ...

Solaris Volume Manager can make easy work of mirroring your root file system, but you have to use the right commands in the right sequence to make easy work of this task. In this week’s column, we’ll ...

Linux provides quite a few commands to look into file system types. Here's a look at the various file system types used by Linux systems and the commands that will identify them. Linux systems use a ...

The btrfsck command is a filesystem-check command like fsck, but it works with the btrfs file system. First a little bit about btrfs. As the name implies, btrfs uses a B-tree data structure that is ...