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A disk is a bunch of bits (2023)


We've heard that a disk is a "bunch of bits", so let's get dirty and personal with those bits.

A keen observer would also notice that the last 16 bytes of 0s are missing from the gdb output – I think due to a compiler optimization). It’s sort of like a distributed system, where you store records in a database (all the metadata), but you put actual file blobs in something like S3 or a disk. We could also parse the location from the inode we loaded into memory, via the i_block field, but the contents are a slightly cryptic array that it takes a bit of code to decode.

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