WSL, Dev Drive, and Filesystem Placement: Choosing Performance Without Losing Interop
Why the WSL ext4 disk, NTFS DrvFs, and ReFS Dev Drive serve genuinely different build and Windows-tool workflows, not interchangeable options.
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16 posts
Why the WSL ext4 disk, NTFS DrvFs, and ReFS Dev Drive serve genuinely different build and Windows-tool workflows, not interchangeable options.
A safe procedure for wsl --mount covering Windows disk ownership, filesystem support, read-only inspection, and clean detachment.
How FreeBSD routes path lookup and file operations through mounts, vnodes, namecache entries, and filesystem-specific VOP methods.
How Haiku BFS combines typed attributes, per-volume indexes, query predicates, live updates, B+trees, and journaling without becoming SQL.
A safe BFS mount-and-repair workflow using hardware detection, DriveSetup, check-only mode, backups, the correct checkfs syntax, and logs.
Using bind mounts to expose one directory at multiple paths, and OverlayFS to layer a writable surface on read-only content — the base of containers.
Released September 25, 2017, High Sierra converted flash-storage Macs to Apple File System automatically — the biggest Mac filesystem shift in decades.
Confirming that /mnt/c's cross-filesystem overhead is the actual cause of slow WSL2 file I/O, then moving the project to fix it structurally, not cosmetically.
Both directions of WSL file access, plus the performance-driven rule for deciding which filesystem a given project's files should actually live on.
WSL's cross-OS file access translates between Linux and Windows filesystem semantics at the protocol level, and that translation has a real performance cost.
A forensic guide to FreeDOS FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 layout, cluster typing, directory and VFAT entries, allocation chains, mirrors, corruption, and recovery.
How FreeBSD ZFS pools, vdevs, datasets, snapshots, replication, scrubs, ARC, and boot environments behave in real operations.
df shows free space but writes fail with ENOSPC — three distinct root causes look identical from outside; here's how to tell them apart.
Understand Linux VFS path lookup, dentries, inodes, open-file descriptions, mounts, page cache, permissions and safe resolution across filesystems.
How APFS's container/volume model, copy-on-write clones, and snapshots replaced HFS+ across every Apple platform starting in 2017.
How NTFS's Master File Table, transaction journal, and lesser-known features like alternate data streams and the USN journal actually work.