Advanced File System and Storage Flashcards
7 cards from real Linux practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Advanced File System and Storage flashcards as text
Which command displays the UUID of all block devices on a Linux system?
Answer: blkid
blkid queries and displays attributes of block devices including their UUIDs, filesystem types, and labels.
In LVM, what is a Physical Extent (PE)?
Answer: The smallest allocatable unit in a Physical Volume
A Physical Extent is the smallest unit of disk space that can be allocated in LVM, typically 4MB by default.
Which ext4 feature reduces fragmentation by pre-allocating contiguous blocks for growing files?
Answer: Delayed allocation
Delayed allocation (also called allocate-on-flush) holds off block assignment until data is actually written, allowing the kernel to allocate contiguous blocks and reduce fragmentation.
What does the 'noatime' mount option do?
Answer: Prevents updating file access timestamps on reads
noatime prevents the kernel from updating the atime (access time) inode field on every file read, significantly reducing disk writes.
Which RAID level requires a minimum of 4 disks and provides both striping and dual-parity?
Answer: RAID 6
RAID 6 uses dual distributed parity, can survive two simultaneous disk failures, and requires a minimum of 4 disks.
What is the purpose of the 'tune2fs -c' command?
Answer: Set the maximum mount count before fsck is forced
tune2fs -c sets the maximum number of mounts after which e2fsck will be run automatically on the ext2/3/4 filesystem.
In ZFS terminology, what is a 'zpool'?
Answer: A storage pool composed of one or more vdevs
A zpool is the top-level ZFS storage container that aggregates one or more virtual devices (vdevs) into a single pool of storage.