Master File Systems for Your OS Exam: 40 Flashcards on Inodes, Journaling and Device I/O
Master 40 file system and I/O flashcards: inodes, journaling, hard links, mounting, NTFS, ext4, ZFS and DMA, plus the two cards you should fix first.
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Operating Systems Study Guide: 88 Flashcards on Kernels, Processes, Threads and Virtual Memory
Study operating systems fundamentals with 88 flashcards: kernel vs user mode, system calls, interrupts, context switches, paging, page faults, RAID, microkernels, POSIX.
Everything an operating system does eventually hits a disk. That is where OS courses get concrete — and where exam questions get specific: inode versus file name, hard link versus symlink, journaling versus plain writes. The Operating Systems: File Systems & I/O deck (code IN7683 on Flip It) is a compact 40 cards. Small enough to finish in three sessions, precise enough to carry a whole exam section.
Study this deck: Operating Systems: File Systems & I/O
1 / 10File system
Tap the card for the answer · swipe right if you knew it, left if not
What the 40 cards actually cover
Four blocks, in deck order:
- Architecture and metadata (cards 1-20): file system, the three layers — logical, virtual (VFS), physical — file name, directory, inode, stored metadata, slack space, fragmentation, why HDDs suffer from it and SSDs do not, access control, permission bits and ACLs, capability-based security, disk quotas, journaling, hard links, symbolic links, mount points, mounting.
- Real file systems (21-29): FAT12/16/32, NTFS, ext4, HFS+, APFS, ZFS, distributed file systems, NFS, SMB.
- Devices and I/O (30-34): block device, character device, buffering, device driver, Direct Memory Access.
- Handles and odd corners (35-40): file descriptor, file handle, defragmentation, RAM disk, tmpfs, root directory.
Note the balance: roughly 35 cards are file systems and only 5 are I/O. The deck title promises more I/O than it delivers.
Nine cards, verbatim
| Front | Back |
|---|---|
| Inode | A data structure in Unix-like file systems storing file metadata (permissions, ownership, timestamps) separate from the file name |
| Slack space | Unused space in an allocated block when file size is not a multiple of the allocation unit |
| Why does fragmentation affect HDDs more than SSDs? | HDDs move mechanical heads, so contiguous blocks are faster; SSDs access any location equally fast |
| Journaling file system | Logs changes before committing them, allowing recovery of a consistent state after a crash |
| Hard link | A directory entry pointing to the same inode as another file name |
| Symbolic link (symlink) | A special file containing a path to another file or directory |
| Mount point | A directory where a file system is attached to make its contents accessible |
| Direct Memory Access (DMA) | Hardware transferring data to/from memory without CPU intervention |
| Tmpfs | A temporary file system stored in virtual memory, losing data on reboot |
Two fixes to make before you drill
Update the SMB card. It says SMB is "also known as CIFS". CIFS is really one dialect — SMB 1.0 — and it has been deprecated for years; modern Windows and Samba negotiate SMB 2 or 3, and SMB1 ships disabled by default. Rewrite the back as "SMB: Windows file-sharing protocol; CIFS is its obsolete 1.0 dialect", because graders do ask for the version. Likewise, the root directory card gives C:\ as the Windows root — each volume has its own root there, so the single-tree analogy only holds for Unix.
Read the truncated fronts as cloze deletions. Three cards lost their question word: Logical file system layer responsible for, Physical file system layer responsible for, Buffering in I/O operations. Say "…is responsible for what?" in your head and they work normally.
Merge the near-duplicates, then fill the gaps
File descriptor and file handle are the same idea in Unix and Windows clothing; mount point and mounting are the noun and the verb; fragmentation, "why HDDs," and defragmentation are one story told three times. Answer each group from any prompt and your true card count drops to about 33.
Then add what a File Systems & I/O syllabus normally includes and this deck does not: superblock, page cache, memory-mapped files, copy-on-write, extents versus block lists, I/O scheduling, polled versus interrupt-driven I/O, FUSE, exFAT, Btrfs and RAID levels. Ten cards of your own turn a good overview into exam coverage.
For the kernel, process and virtual memory half of the syllabus, work through our operating systems study guide first — it ends exactly where this deck begins. Then sign in to Flip It and open Operating Systems: File Systems & I/O (IN7683).
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