Welcome to the File System Construction Kit!  This is a software
package that accompanies the book, Practical File System Design, which
Dominic Giampaolo wrote and is published by Morgan Kaufmann (ISBN
1558604979).

This package is a very simple framework in which you can experiment
with a working (but simple) file system implementation.  The framework
is designed so that you can go in and modify one part of it, such as
how the used and free disk blocks are managed, and not have to touch
the rest of the file system.  And because the package creates its file
system inside of a normal file on your hard disk, you don't have to
have a spare disk or require special (root) privileges to run the
program.  The goal is that this package should provide a convenient
test bed for trying out new file system ideas without having to go
through the pain and difficulty of creating a real kernel based file
system.  The API is generic enough however that after an you debug
your implementation within this framework it could be moved to a real
kernel based file system for the BeOS or a Unix like operating system.