The Boot File System (named BFS on Linux, but BFS also refers to the
Be File System) was used on
UnixWare to store files necessary to its boot process.
It does not support directories, and only allows contiguous allocation for files, to make it simpler to be used by the boot loader.
Implementations
Besides the UnixWare support, Martin Hinner wrote a bfs kernel module for
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
that supports it.
He documented the file system layout as part of the process.
The Linux kernel implementation of BFS was written by Tigran Aivazian and it became part of the standard kernel sources on 28 October 1999 (Linux version 2.3.25).
The original BFS was written at AT&T Bell Laboratories for the
UNIX System V
Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, an ...
,
Version 4.0 porting base in 1986. It was written by Ron Schnell, who is also the author of
Dunnet (game).
BFS was the first non-S5 (System V) Filesystem written using VFS (
Virtual Filesystem
A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS ...
) for AT&T UNIX.
References
{{Filesystem
Disk file systems
Linux