Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Fri, 19 Jul 2002 01:01:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Fri, 19 Jul 2002 01:01:39 -0400 Received: from [202.54.24.132] ([202.54.24.132]:46493 "EHLO dns5.ggn.hcltech.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Fri, 19 Jul 2002 01:01:38 -0400 Message-ID: <5F0021EEA434D511BE7300D0B7B6AB5304249CC7@mail2.ggn.hcltech.com> From: "Mohamed Ghouse , Gurgaon" To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: RE: Alright, I give up. What does the "i" in "inode" stand for? Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 10:38:12 +0530 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2984 Lines: 72 I think U should have referred The Design of the Unix Operating Systems -Maurice J Bach. He tells that I stands for Index. ;-) -MG -----Original Message----- From: Rob Landley [mailto:landley@trommello.org] Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 4:04 AM To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Alright, I give up. What does the "i" in "inode" stand for? I've been sitting on this question for years, hoping I'd come across the answer, and I STILL don't know what the "i" is short for. Somebody here has got to know this. :) I know what an inode IS (although it took me almost a year to figure this out, way back when), but I don't know what the name means. I've been following this list for years now, and nobody's ever actually said what the i stands for, and neither do the (sparse) comments in fs/inode.c. I've read Peter Salus's book "a Quarter Century of Unix". I've read the history of early unix development on Dennis Richie's home page, and although it complains that his original notes came back form the dictation service misspelling "inode" as "eyenode", it doesn't say what the I stands for. I'm only about a third of the way into "Life with Unix", but it doesn't seem like a particularly technical history so far... Another question I'm unclear about is "does every userspace-visible memory allocation have an inode"? Loaded programs are basically mmaped files, and shared memory is now its own filesystem out of which you mmap stuff. But I don't know about a process's stack and heap. For a while I thought that swap could be thought of as a filesystem out of which the heaps were mapped as sparse files (this is the only explanation that made sense in early 2.5 when every page used HAD to have swap backing store, and taking away the mandatory backing store would just be an exercise in deferred allocation), but that apparently is not the case and I got disabused of this notion a while back. Instead I learn what a "classzone" is. Ok... Then earlier today I wander across kerneltrap's interview with Larry McVoy, who espouses the viewpoint that Linux VM design should store statistics in inodes rather than worrying so much about individual pages, and I get confused again. Has each process space's heap got an inode? If so, in what filesystem? Rob (Yes, I am breaking the internet convention of posting errors rather than asking questions if you want people to respond. I can come up with some errors if you'd like. I'm good at that. :) - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/