Book on theory of filesystems

Question

Is there a book explaining the design of FAT32, NTFS, ReiserFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, ZFS, XFS, btrfs, ...

Most books describe the filesystem as it is, but don't answer the question why it was designed the way it is. I would like a book that explains the theory of why each filesystem was designed the way it is compared to other filesystems, explaining the various tradeoffs in performance to semantics. It would be like theoretical computer science meets filesystems.

Answer 1

There is no single book that covers all of your requirements. A book that covers one file system in particular and has briefly reviews of other file systems is "Practical file system design" by Dominic Giampaolo. An online description of the ext2 file system is available at http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2intro.html . Some implementation specific parts of ext2 are explained in "Linux Kernel Architecture" by Mauerer.