Book on file system theory

Question

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

Most books describe the file system as it is, but do not answer the question of why it was designed the way it is. I would like the book to explain the theory why each file system was designed the way it compares with other file systems, explaining the various trade-offs in performance with semantics. It will be like theoretical informatics corresponding to file systems.

Answer 1

There is no single book that covers all your requirements. A book that covers, in particular, one file system and briefly looks at other file systems, is Dominic Giampaolo's Practical File System Design. An online description of the ext2 file system is available at http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2intro.html . Some specific parts of the ext2 implementation are explained in the Linux Kernel Architecture by Maurer.