person Tute World Team

Phase 5: Storage & I/O

Storage is where your data lives permanently. Understanding how Linux abstracts hardware into devices, how it caches disk reads to speed things up, and how to build reliable storage with LVM and RAID gives you the tools to design and troubleshoot any storage system.

What You'll Learn

1. Block vs Character Devices

How Linux represents hardware as files, major/minor numbers.

2. I/O Scheduler

How the kernel orders disk requests for performance.

3. Buffer & Page Cache

How Linux caches disk data in RAM — and when to drop it.

4. fsync & fdatasync

Durability guarantees — how to ensure data survives a crash.

5. LVM Explained

Flexible disk management: physical volumes, volume groups, logical volumes.

6. RAID in Linux

RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 — software RAID with mdadm.

7. /sys Filesystem

How Linux exposes hardware configuration as files.

8. udev Explained

How Linux auto-detects hardware and creates /dev entries.