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[DarkLordofthePenguins]

I am wondering how inodes are stored or created in Mac OS X. I understand that the HFS+ filesystem used by Mac OS uses a file catalog to store metadata about files and pointers to their blocks. However, the POSIX interface in OS X allows you to manage files and directories in the same way you do on a traditional Unix system (using inodes, hard links, etc.), and the stat system call shows inode information not contained within the file catalog nodes.

How does this work? Is there an actual inode table existing alongside the file catalog? Or is it a virtual inode table generated by the VFS from information stored in the file catalog and file forks?