In the previous lesson, you have learned about storage devices and you created partitions,
LVM logical volumes, as well as RAID devices.
Now we are going to zoom into the file systems that you can put on top of it.
Multiple file systems are available for Linux.
Sometimes it depends on the distribution that you are using whether or not a file system
is here.
Let me list the most important ones, starting with exe3.
Exe3 is the old Linux standard.
It's a journaling file system and that means that it has a transaction log that allows
it to recover if ever your server crashed and you need to repair files that were open.
Exe4 is an update to exe3.
That has been around for almost two decades already, so exe3 really is old.
Exe4 is a very stable file system and for that reason, it is still used on many Linux
distributions.
XFS is a file system that was developed to deal with large amounts of data.
Red Hat is using it and Red Hat has tuned it a lot to make sure that it can deal with
data in the biggest of environments.
NFS is a little bit different.
It's a network file system.
It allows you to mount shares that come in from different servers.
And SMB or CIFS is a file system that is also network-based.
It's an interface to Windows-compatible shares, so you can use it to mount a Windows share
on your Linux machine.
And that is VFAT.
VFAT is the most compatible file system and that means that you can use VFAT on Linux,
on macOS, as well as on Windows.
So if ever you have a USB thumb drive and you want to be able to share your USB thumb
drive between all of these operating systems, VFAT basically is the only choice that you've
got.
NTFS is a Windows NTFS implementation, but enterprise distributions like Red Hat do not
support it.
And let's face it, there is no reason to use NTFS because NTFS belongs to Windows.
Linux has its own file systems that are taking care of file storage pretty decently.
And the last file system mentioned here is BTRFS.
This is to be pronounced as Butter FS.
It's a relatively new Linux file system that offers many advanced features, but not all
of these features are very stable.
And for that reason, you don't find it as a default file system on the bigger Linux
distributions.
Let's continue with the next couple of lessons where you can learn how to work with these
file systems.