computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

, an extent is a contiguous area of storage reserved for a file in a

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

, represented as a range of block numbers, or tracks on

count key data Count key data (CKD) is a direct-access storage device (DASD) data recording format introduced in 1964, by IBM with its IBM System/360 and still being emulated on IBM mainframes. It is a self-defining format with each data record represented by a ...

devices. A file can consist of zero or more extents; one file fragment requires one extent. The direct benefit is in storing each range compactly as two numbers, instead of canonically storing every block number in the range. Also, extent allocation results in less file fragmentation. Extent-based file systems can also eliminate most of the

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

overhead of large files that would traditionally be taken up by the block-allocation tree. But because the savings are small compared to the amount of stored data (for all file sizes in general) but make up a large portion of the metadata (for large files), the overall benefits in storage efficiency and performance are slight. In order to resist fragmentation, several extent-based file systems do allocate-on-flush. Many modern

fault-tolerant Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

file systems also do copy-on-write, although that increases fragmentation. As a similar design, the CP/M file system uses extents as well, but those do not correspond to the definition given above.

CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...

's extents appear contiguously as a single block in the combined directory/allocation table, and they do not necessarily correspond to a contiguous data area on disk. IBM OS/360 and successors allocate files in multiples of disk tracks or

cylinders A cylinder (from ) has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base. A cylinder may also be defined as an infini ...

. Files could originally have up to 16 extents, but this restriction has since been lifted. The initial allocation size and the size of additional extents to be allocated if required are specified by the user via

Job Control Language Job Control Language (JCL) is a name for scripting languages used on IBM mainframe operating systems to instruct the system on how to run a batch job or start a subsystem. More specifically, the purpose of JCL is to say which programs to run, us ...

. The system attempts to allocate the initial size as a contiguous area, although this may be split if contiguous space is not available.

Adoption

The systems supporting filesystem extents include the following: *

APFS Apple File System (APFS) is a proprietary file system developed and deployed by Apple Inc. for macOS Sierra (10.12.4) and later, iOS 10.3 and later, tvOS 10.2 and later, watchOS 3.2 and later, and all versions of iPadOS. It aims to fix c ...

Apple File System * ASM Automatic Storage Management Oracle's database-oriented filesystem * BFS

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

Zeta Zeta (, ; uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; grc, ζῆτα, el, ζήτα, label= Demotic Greek, classical or ''zē̂ta''; ''zíta'') is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7. It was derived f ...

and

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

operating systems * Btrfs Extent-based copy-on-write (COW) file system for Linux * EFS Extent File System SGI's first-generation file system for

Irix IRIX ( ) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and ...

* Ext4

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 ...

filesystem (when the configuration enables extents the default in Linux since version 2.6.23) *

Files-11 Files-11 is the file system used by Digital Equipment Corporation OpenVMS operating system, and also (in a simpler form) by the older RSX-11. It is a hierarchical file system, with support for access control lists, record-oriented I/O, remote ...

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

filesystem *

HFS HFS may refer to: Computing * Hardware functionality scan, a security mechanism used in Microsoft Windows operating systems * Hierarchical File System, a file system used by Apple Macintosh computers * Hierarchical File System (IBM MVS), used MV ...

and HFS Plus Hierarchical File System

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

filesystems *

High Performance File System HPFS (High Performance File System) is a file system created specifically for the OS/2 operating system to improve upon the limitations of the FAT file system. It was written by Gordon Letwin and others at Microsoft and added to OS/2 version 1 ...

(HPFS) on OS/2, eComStation and

ArcaOS ArcaOS is an operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was codenamed Blue Lion during its development. It builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and l ...

* IceFS IceFileSystem optional file system for MorphOS * JFS Journaled File System used by

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set *Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgium ...

, OS/2/eComStation/ArcaOS and

operating systems * ISO 9660 Extent-based file system for optical disc media *

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ma ...

versions 2000–2008 support extents of up to 64 KB * Multi-Programming Executive a filesystem by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

* NTFS *

OCFS2 The Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS, in its second version OCFS2) is a shared disk file system developed by Oracle Corporation and released under the GNU General Public License. The first version of OCFS was developed with the main focus to accom ...

Oracle Cluster File System a

shared-disk file system A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for ...

for Linux * Reiser4 Linux filesystem (in "extents" mode) *

SINTRAN III Sintran III is a real-time, multitasking, multi-user operating system used with Norsk Data minicomputers from 1974. Unlike its predecessors Sintran I and II, it was written entirely by Norsk Data, in Nord Programming Language (Nord PL, NPL), ...

file system used by early computer company Norsk Data * UDF Universal Disk Format standard for optical media *

VERITAS File System The VERITAS File System (or VxFS; called JFS and OnlineJFS in HP-UX) is an extent-based file system. It was originally developed by VERITAS Software. Through an OEM agreement, VxFS is used as the primary filesystem of the HP-UX operating syste ...

enabled via the pre-allocation API and CLI *

XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as ...

SGI's second-generation file system for

and

References

External links

Getting to know the Solaris filesystem, Part 1
Allocation and storage strategy a comparison of block-based and extent-based allocation {{File systems, state=collapsed Computer file systems

Adoption

See also

References

External links