Okay, but what are blocks then? A file is really just a bunch of blocked stacked together with the inode metadata also sitting on another block, so is everything just blocks or because you can emulate a block device on a filesystem, are blocks themselves files? If that last part is true then files are infinitely recursive and my head is starting to spin.
You are almost ready to take the next step. But to do so, you must unlearn what you think you know. Write a filesystem that does not have blocks for a media without pages, and you will find the footprints of your next teacher.
Okay, but what are blocks then? A file is really just a bunch of blocked stacked together with the inode metadata also sitting on another block, so is everything just blocks or because you can emulate a block device on a filesystem, are blocks themselves files? If that last part is true then files are infinitely recursive and my head is starting to spin.
You are almost ready to take the next step. But to do so, you must unlearn what you think you know. Write a filesystem that does not have blocks for a media without pages, and you will find the footprints of your next teacher.
The devnode that is used to reference the block is a file, so you come back to blocks just ‘being offsets into some file’.
Though system calls, ioctls and networking credibly get away from file semantics