List of file systems

These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices:

• Bcachefs – It's not yet upstream, full data and metadata checksumming,[8][9] bcache is the bottom half of the filesystem.[10]
• Btrfs – A file system based on B-Trees, initially designed at Oracle Corporation.
• HAMMER and HAMMER2 – DragonFly BSD's primary filesystems, created by Matt Dillon.[1][2][4][5]
• NOVA – The "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
• ReFS (Resilient File System) – A file system by Microsoft with built-in resiliency features.
• Reliance – A transactional file system with CRCs, created by Datalight.
• Reliance Nitro – A tree-based transactional file system with CRCs, developed for high performance and reliability in embedded systems, from Datalight.
• ZFS – Has checksums for all data; important metadata is always redundant, additional redundancy levels are user-configurable; copy-on-write and transactional writing ensure metadata consistency; corrupted data can be automatically repaired if a redundant copy is available. Created by Sun Microsystems for use on Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, ported to FreeBSD 7.0, NetBSD (as of August 2009), Linux and to FUSE (not to be confused with the two zFSes from IBM)

Solid state media, such as flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. At low level, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms. Typically a device such as a solid-state drive handles such operations internally and therefore a regular file system can be used. However, for certain specialized installations (embedded systems, industrial applications) a file system optimized for plain flash memory is advantageous.

• APFS – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
• CHFS – a NetBSD filesystem for embedded systems optimised for raw flash media.
• exFAT – Microsoft proprietary system intended for flash cards (see also XCFiles, an exFAT implementation for Wind River VxWorks and other embedded operating systems).
• ExtremeFFS – internal filesystem for SSDs.
• F2FS – Flash-Friendly File System. An open source Linux file system introduced by Samsung in 2012.[11]
• FFS2 (presumably preceded by FFS1), one of the earliest flash file systems. Developed and patented by Microsoft in the early 1990s.[12]
• JFFS – original log structured Linux file system for NOR flash media.
• JFFS2 – successor of JFFS, for NAND and NOR flash.
• LSFS – a Log-structured file system with writable snapshots and inline data deduplication created by StarWind Software. Uses DRAM and flash to cache spinning disks.
• LogFS – intended to replace JFFS2, better scalability. No longer under active development.[13]
• NILFS – a log-structured file system for Linux with continuous snapshots.
• Non-Volatile File System – the system for flash memory introduced by Palm, Inc.
• NOVA – the "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
• OneFS – a filesystem utilized by Isilon. It supports selective placement of meta-data directly onto flash SSD.
• Segger Microcontroller Systems emFile – filesystem for deeply embedded applications which supports both NAND and NOR flash. Wear leveling, fast read and write, and very low RAM usage.
• SPIFFS – SPI Flash File System, a wear-leveling filesystem intended for small NOR flash devices.
• TFAT – a transactional version of the FAT filesystem.
• TrueFFS – internal file system for SSDs, implementing error correction, bad block re-mapping and wear-leveling.
• UBIFS – successor of JFFS2, optimized to utilize NAND and NOR flash.
• Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) – an internal file system utilized by NetApp within their DataONTAP OS, originally optimized to use non-volatile DRAM. WAFL uses RAID-DP to protect against multiple disk failures and NVRAM for transaction log replays.
• YAFFS – a log-structured file system designed for NAND flash, but also used with NOR flash.
• LittleFS – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers.
• JesFS – Jo's embedded serial FileSystem.[14] A very small footprint and robust filesystem, designed for very small microcontroller (16/32 bit). Open Source and licensed under GPL v3.

In record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.

• CMS file system – The native file system of the Conversational Monitor System component of VM/370
• Files-11 – early versions were record-oriented; support for "streams" was added later
• Michigan Terminal System (MTS) – provides "line files" where record lengths and line numbers are associated as metadata with each record in the file, lines can be added, replaced, updated with the same or different length records, and deleted anywhere in the file without the need to read and rewrite the entire file.[15]
• OS4000 for GEC's OS4000 operating system, on the GEC 4000 series minicomputers
• A FAT12 and FAT16 (and FAT32) extension to support database-like file types random file, direct file, keyed file and sequential file in Digital Research FlexOS, IBM 4680 OS and Toshiba 4690 OS.[16] The record size is stored on a file-by-file basis in special entries in the directory table.[17]
• Sequential access methods for IBM's z/OS and z/VSE mainframe operating systems: Basic Sequential Access Method (BSAM), Basic Partitioned Access Method (BPAM) and Queued Sequential Access Method (QSAM); see Access methods and Data set (IBM mainframe) for more examples
• Pick Operating System – A record-oriented filesystem and database that uses hash-coding to store data.
• Shared File System (SFS) for IBM's VM
• Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM) – for IBM's z/OS and z/VSE mainframe operating systems

Shared-disk file systems (also called shared-storage file systems, SAN file system, Clustered file system or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared-disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared-disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.

Shared-disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers.

• CXFS (Clustered XFS) from Silicon Graphics (SGI). Available for Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, AIX and IRIX. Asymmetric.
• Dell Fluid File System (formerly ExaFS) proprietary software sold by Dell. Shared-disk system sold as an appliance providing distributed file systems to clients. Running on Intel based hardware serving NFS v2/v3, SMB/CIFS and AFP to Windows, macOS, Linux and other UNIX clients.
• Blue Whale Clustered file system (BWFS) from Zhongke Blue Whale. Asymmetric. Available for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS.
• SAN File System (SFS) from DataPlow. Available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and macOS. Symmetric and Asymmetric.
• EMC Celerra HighRoad from EMC. Available for Linux, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and Windows. Asymmetric.
• Files-11 on VMSclusters, released by DEC in 1983, now from HP. Symmetric.
• GFS2 (Global File System) from Red Hat. Available for Linux under GPL. Symmetric (GDLM) or Asymmetric (GULM).
• IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) Windows, Linux, AIX . Parallel
• Nasan Clustered File System from DataPlow. Available for Linux and Solaris. Asymmetric.
• Oracle ACFS from Oracle Corporation. Available for Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 only). Symmetric.
• OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster File System) from Oracle Corporation. Available for Linux under GPL. Symmetric.
• QFS from Sun Microsystems. Available for Linux (client only) and Solaris (metadata server and client). Asymmetric.
• ScoutFS from Versity. Available for Linux under the GPL. Symmetric.
• StorNext File System from Quantum. Asymmetric. Available for AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows. Interoperable with Xsan. Formerly known as CVFS.
• Veritas Storage Foundation from Symantec. Available for AIX, HP-UX, Linux and Solaris. Asymmetric.
• Xsan from Apple Inc. Available for macOS. Asymmetric. Interoperable with StorNext File System.
• VMFS from VMware/EMC Corporation. Available for VMware ESX Server. Symmetric.

Distributed fault-tolerant replication of data between nodes (between servers or servers/clients) for high availability and offline (disconnected) operation.

• Coda from Carnegie Mellon University focuses on bandwidth-adaptive operation (including disconnected operation) using a client-side cache for mobile computing. It is a descendant of AFS-2. It is available for Linux under the GPL.
• Distributed File System (Dfs) from Microsoft focuses on location transparency and high availability. Available for Windows under a proprietary software license.
• HAMMER and HAMMER2 – DragonFly BSD's filesystems for clustered storage, created by Matt Dillon.[1][5]
• InterMezzo from Cluster File Systems uses synchronization over HTTP. Available for Linux under GPL but no longer in development since the developers are working on Lustre.
• LizardFS a networking, distributed file system based on MooseFS[18]
• Moose File System (MooseFS) is a networking, distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical locations (servers), which are visible to a user as one resource. Works on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris and macOS. Master server and chunkservers can also run on Solaris and Windows with Cygwin.
• Scality is a distributed fault-tolerant filesystem.
• Tahoe-LAFS is an open source secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem utilizing encryption as the basis for a least-authority replicated design.
• A FAT12 and FAT16 (and FAT32) extension to support automatic file distribution across nodes with extra attributes like local, mirror on update, mirror on close, compound on update, compound on close in IBM 4680 OS and Toshiba 4690 OS. The distribution attributes are stored on a file-by-file basis in special entries in the directory table.[19][20]

Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).

Some of the distributed parallel file systems use an object storage device (OSD) (in Lustre called OST) for chunks of data together with centralized metadata servers.

• Lustre is an open-source high-performance distributed parallel file system for Linux, used on many of the largest computers in the world.
• Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS, PVFS2, OrangeFS). Developed to store virtual system images, with a focus on non-shared writing optimizations. Available for Linux under GPL.

Distributed file systems, which also are parallel and fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters.

All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.

In development:

• zFS from IBM (not to be confused with ZFS from Sun Microsystems or the zFS file system provided with IBM's z/OS operating system) focus on cooperative cache and distributed transactions and uses object storage devices. Under development and not freely available.
• HAMMER/ANVIL by Matt Dillon
• PNFS (Parallel NFS) – Clients available for Linux and OpenSolaris and back-ends from NetApp, Panasas, EMC Highroad and IBM GPFS
• Coherent Remote File System (CRFS) – requires Btrfs
• Parallel Optimized Host Message Exchange Layered File System (POHMELFS) and Distributed STorage (DST). POSIX compliant, added to Linux kernel 2.6.30

Some of these may be called cooperative storage cloud.

• Cleversafe uses Cauchy Reed–Solomon information dispersal algorithms to separate data into unrecognizable slices and distribute them, via secure Internet connections, to multiple storage locations.
• Scality is a distributed filesystem using the Chord peer-to-peer protocol.
• IPFS InterPlanetary File System is p2p, worldwide distributed content-addressable, file-system.

• devfs – a virtual file system in Unix-like operating systems for managing device nodes on-the-fly
• procfs – a pseudo-file system, used to access kernel information about processes
• tmpfs – in-memory temporary file system (on Unix-like platforms)
• sysfs – a virtual file system in Linux holding information about buses, devices, firmware, filesystems, etc.
• debugfs – a virtual file system in Linux for accessing and controlling kernel debugging
• configfs – a writable file system used to configure various kernel components of Linux
• sysctlfs – allow accessing sysctl nodes via a file system; available on NetBSD via PUFFS,[29] FreeBSD kernel via a 3rd-party module,[30][31][32] and Linux as a part of Linux procfs.[33]
• kernfs – a file system found on some BSD systems (notably NetBSD) that provides access to some kernel state variables; similar to sysctlfs, Linux procfs and Linux sysfs.
• wikifs – a server application for Plan 9's virtual, wiki, file system

• eCryptfs – a stacked cryptographic file system in the Linux kernel since 2.6.19
• EncFS, GPL Encrypted file system in user-space
• Rubberhose filesystem
• EFS – an encrypted file system for Microsoft Windows systems and AIX. An extension of NTFS
• ZFS, with encryption support.

These are not really file systems; they allow access to file systems from an operating system standpoint.

• FUSE (file system in userspace, like LUFS but better maintained)
• LUFS (Linux userland file system – seems to be abandoned in favour of FUSE)
• PUFFS (Userspace filesystem for NetBSD, including a compatibility layer called librefuse for porting existing FUSE-based applications)
• Secure Shell File System (SSHFS) – locally mount a remote directory on a server using only a secure shell login.
• VFS Virtual Filesystem