Files-11

Files-11 is the used in the RSX-11 and OpenVMS operating systems from Digital Equipment Corporation. It supports record-oriented I/O, remote network access, and . The original ODS-1 layer is a ; the ODS-2 version is a , with support for access control lists,. Files-11 is similar to, but significantly more advanced than, the file systems used in previous Digital Equipment Corporation operating systems such as TOPS-20 and RSTS/E. The native OpenVMS file system is descended from older DEC operating systems and is similar in many ways, both having been designed by Dave Cutler. A major difference is the layout of directories. These file systems all provided some form of rudimentary non-hierarchical directory structure, typically based on assigning one directory per user account. Under RSTS/E, each user account was represented by two numbers, a [project,programmer] pair, and had one associated directory. Special system files, such as program executables and the OS itself, were stored in the directory of a reserved system account. While this was suitable for PDP-11 systems, which possessed limited permanent storage capacity, VAX systems with much larger hard drives required a more flexible method of file storage: hierarchical directory layout in particular, the most notable improvement in ODS-2. "Files-11" is the general term for five separate file systems, known as on-disk structure (ODS) levels 1 through 5. ODS-1 is the used by the RSX-11 OS, supported by older VMS systems for RSX compatibility, but never used to support VMS itself; it has been largely superseded by ODS-2 and ODS-5. ODS-2 is the standard VMS file system, and remains the most common file system for system disks (the disk on which the operating system is installed). Although seldom referred to by their ODS level designations, ODS-3 and ODS-4 are the Files-11 support for the CD-ROM ISO 9660 and High Sierra Format file systems, respectively. ODS-5 is an extended version of ODS-2 available on Alpha and IA-64 platforms which adds support for case-preserving filenames with non-ASCII characters and improvements to the hierarchical directory support.