File System, Part 5: Virtual file systems

Under construction!

How can I copy bytes from one file to another?

Use dd command. For example, the following command copies 1mb of data from the file /dev/urandom to the file /dev/null. The data is copied as 1024 blocks of blocksize 1024 bytes.

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/null bs=1k count=1024

Both the input and output files in the example above are virtual - they don't exist on a disk. Instead they are part of the dev filesystem, which is virtual filesystem provided by the kernel. The virtual file /dev/urandom provides an infinite stream of random bytes, while the virtal file /dev/null ignores all bytes written to it. A common use of /dev/null is to discard the output of a command,

myverboseexecutable > /dev/null

Another commonly used /dev virtual file is /dev/zero which provides an infinite stream of zero bytes. For example, we can benchmark the operating system performance of reading stream zero bytes in the kernel into a process memory and writing the bytes back to the kernel without any disk I/O. Note the throughput (~20GB/s) is strongly dependent on blocksize. For small block sizes the overhead of additional read and write system calls will dominate.

> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 0.0539153 s, 19.9 GB/s

Todo - move this to a different section

What happens when I touch a file?

The touch executable creates file if it does not exist and also updates the file's last modified time to be the current time. For example, we can make a new private file with the current time:

> umask 077       # all future new files will maskout all r,w,x bits for group and other access
> touch file123   # create a file if it does not exist, and update its modified time
> stat file123
  File: `file123'
  Size: 0         	Blocks: 0          IO Block: 65536  regular empty file
Device: 21h/33d	Inode: 226148      Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: (395606/ angrave)   Gid: (61019/     ews)
Access: 2014-11-12 13:42:06.000000000 -0600
Modify: 2014-11-12 13:42:06.001787000 -0600
Change: 2014-11-12 13:42:06.001787000 -0600

An example use of touch is to force make to recompile a file that is unchanged after modifying the compiler options inside the makefile. Remeber that make is 'lazy' - it will compare the modified time of the source file with the corresponding output file to see if the file needs to be recompiled

touch myprogram.c   # force my source file to be recompiled
make

Virtual file systems

POSIX systems, such as Linux and Mac OSX (which is based on BSD) include several virtual filesystems that are mounted (available) as part of the file-system. Files inside these virtual filesysems do not exist on the exist; they are generated dynamically by the kernel when a process requests a directory listing. Linux provides 3 main virtual filesystems

/dev  - A list of physical and virtual devices (for example network card, cdrom, random number generator)
/proc - A list of resources used by each process and (by tradition) set of system information
/sys - An organized list of internal kernel entities

How do I find out what filesystems are currently available (mounted)?

Use mount Using mount without any options generates a list (one filesystem per line) of mounted filesystems including networked, virtual and local (spinning disk / SSD-based) filesystems. Here is a typical output of mount

``

mount /dev/mapper/cs241--server_sys-root on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,rootcontext="system_u:object_r:tmpfs_t:s0") /dev/sda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw) /dev/mapper/cs241--server_sys-srv on /srv type ext4 (rw) /dev/mapper/cs241--server_sys-tmp on /tmp type ext4 (rw) /dev/mapper/cs241--server_sys-var on /var type ext4 (rw)rw,bind) /srv/software/Mathematica-8.0 on /software/Mathematica-8.0 type none (rw,bind) engr-ews-homes.engr.illinois.edu:/fs1-homes/angrave/linux on /home/angrave type nfs (rw,soft,intr,tcp,noacl,acregmin=30,vers=3,sec=sys,sloppy,addr=128.174.252.102)

Notice that each line includes the filesystem type source of the filesystem and mount point.
To reduce this output we can pipe it into `grep` and only see lines that match a regular expression. 

mount | grep proc # only see lines that contain 'proc' proc on /proc type proc (rw) none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)

##Todo
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /media/cdrom
mount
mount | grep proc

Examples of virtual files in /proc:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
hexdump /dev/random
hexdump /dev/urandom

Differences between random and urandom?

cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep bogomips

cat /proc/meminfo | grep Swap

cd /proc/self
echo $$; cd /proc/12345; cat maps