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Koray Tugay
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I am reading a book on Operating Systems, and I am confused in a part about Internal File Structure. Quoting from the book:

Disk systems typically have a well-defined block size determined by the size of a sector. All disk I/O is performed in units of one block (physical record), and all blocks are the same size. It is unlikely that the physical record size will exactly match the length of the desired logical record. Logical records may even vary in length.

Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks is a common solution to this problem. For example, the UNIX operating system defines all files to be simply streams of bytes. Each byte is individually addressable by its offset from the beginning (or end) of the file. In this case, the logical record size is 1 byte. The file system automatically packs and unpacks bytes into physical disk blocks —say, 512 bytes per block— as necessary.

What is meant by Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks meanin here?

I am reading a book on Operating Systems, and I am confused in a part about Internal File Structure. Quoting from the book:

Disk systems typically have a well-defined block size determined by the size of a sector. All disk I/O is performed in units of one block (physical record), and all blocks are the same size. It is unlikely that the physical record size will exactly match the length of the desired logical record. Logical records may even vary in length.

Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks is a common solution to this problem. For example, the UNIX operating system defines all files to be simply streams of bytes. Each byte is individually addressable by its offset from the beginning (or end) of the file. In this case, the logical record size is 1 byte. The file system automatically packs and unpacks bytes into physical disk blocks —say, 512 bytes per block— as necessary.

What is meant by Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks mean here?

I am reading a book on Operating Systems, and I am confused in a part about Internal File Structure. Quoting from the book:

Disk systems typically have a well-defined block size determined by the size of a sector. All disk I/O is performed in units of one block (physical record), and all blocks are the same size. It is unlikely that the physical record size will exactly match the length of the desired logical record. Logical records may even vary in length.

Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks is a common solution to this problem. For example, the UNIX operating system defines all files to be simply streams of bytes. Each byte is individually addressable by its offset from the beginning (or end) of the file. In this case, the logical record size is 1 byte. The file system automatically packs and unpacks bytes into physical disk blocks —say, 512 bytes per block— as necessary.

What is meant by Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks in here?

Source Link
Koray Tugay
  • 2k
  • 8
  • 24
  • 39

What is "File Packing" done by an Operating System?

I am reading a book on Operating Systems, and I am confused in a part about Internal File Structure. Quoting from the book:

Disk systems typically have a well-defined block size determined by the size of a sector. All disk I/O is performed in units of one block (physical record), and all blocks are the same size. It is unlikely that the physical record size will exactly match the length of the desired logical record. Logical records may even vary in length.

Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks is a common solution to this problem. For example, the UNIX operating system defines all files to be simply streams of bytes. Each byte is individually addressable by its offset from the beginning (or end) of the file. In this case, the logical record size is 1 byte. The file system automatically packs and unpacks bytes into physical disk blocks —say, 512 bytes per block— as necessary.

What is meant by Packing a number of logical records into physical blocks mean here?