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| Samsung introduces new flash-friendly filesystem |
| By Thom Holwerda, submitted by robojerk on 2012-10-06 13:59:42 |
| "F2FS is a new file system carefully designed for the NAND flash memory-based storage devices. We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage. Also we remedy some known issues of the very old log structured file system, such as snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead." |
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| Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-10-06 15:08:38 |
|
Don't let Apple find out! Next thing you know, they'll try to find something to sue over in this new file system. But a bit more seriously though, this is a good thing. It's disappointing that when it comes to flash media, no suitable file system has gained popularity and we're still stuck with FAT. Well, ext2, too--but at the expense of cross-platform read/write-ability because some company in Redmond wants you to use their crappy, antiquated file system from the 1980s. And apparently every company loves it because, being such creaky old and simplistic technology, implementing it is a breeze. That said, IMO ext2 is not that good of a solution either really; there needs to be a file system built from the ground up to support all major operating systems equally. Something designed for flash drives and with implementations for all major operating systems from the start. |
 - Score: 5 |
| What happened to nilfs? |
| By jefro on 2012-10-06 15:45:20 |
| And what is the deal with linux and ZFS? Why not use the best fs? |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By _txf_ on 2012-10-06 16:09:14 |
|
> But a bit more seriously though, this is a good thing. It's disappointing that when it comes to flash media, no suitable file system has gained popularity and we're still stuck with FAT. Well, ext2, too-- The thing here is that any block device filesystem will do for external media due to the hardware FTL (flash translation layer -- converts flash into a block device). The post implies that this filesystem is to be used as a block device and not a mtd device. What confuses me is that they compare this to log structured filesystems, but those are usually used in mtd devices (which lack a FTL). So what is the use case specifically for this FS? Edited 2012-10-06 16:10 UTC |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE: What happened to nilfs? |
| By ssokolow on 2012-10-06 16:10:44 |
|
> And what is the deal with linux and ZFS? Why not use the best fs? The existing kernel-level implementation is under CDDL which is GPL-incompatible and the abstract filesystem itself is covered by software patents that not even pre-Oracle Sun was eager to share. |
| - Score: 4 |
| How does this FS compare to... |
| By olefiver on 2012-10-06 16:47:10 |
|
... LogFS, UBIFS, and YAFFS. Was there really a need to invent yet another wheel? Been a while since I looked into flash-specific filesystems, so I may remember wrongly that the three above are also Flash FS's. Is this another case of Not Invented Here, or does F2FS have merit? |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By galvanash on 2012-10-06 18:32:01 |
|
From the KML, it seems some of the kernel devs are confused as well... It seems that it does not do wear leveling and is designed to work with an FTL, but its as clear as mud to me. I guess it will all shake out eventually. It does look interesting though: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.l... |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: What happened to nilfs? |
| By No it isnt on 2012-10-06 19:16:42 |
| ZFS isn't the best FS for small flash filesystems on mobile devices. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: What happened to nilfs? |
| By _txf_ on 2012-10-06 19:23:24 |
|
> ZFS isn't the best FS for small flash filesystems on mobile devices. Nor for the average computer. It loves to feast on ram, and starts running like crap sometimes even with 4GB... Edited 2012-10-06 19:23 UTC |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[3]: Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By some1 on 2012-10-06 19:23:45 |
|
FTL handles wear leveling, but introduces unusual performance characteristics: in-place updates become very expensive. In many cases this can be helped by file system doing copy-on-write instead of in-place update. I guess this is the idea. That said, I thought Samsung has enough resources to proof read the documentation before submitting (at least use a spell checker). Comparison to similar file systems and some benchmark results would also help. |
| - Score: 3 |
| Re: |
| By kurkosdr on 2012-10-06 22:23:21 |
|
The interesting thing here is that Samsung might (might) release a tool tgat will allow usage of this FS with Windows, breakibg the artificial lockin to FAT32 and exFAT imposed by Windows. PS: Yes theoretically Apple can file a patent for this, and then Samsung will have to prove prior act which bought/incompetent judges like Koh will ignore Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; el-gr; LG-P990 Build/GRJ23) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 MMS/LG-Android-MMS-V1.0/1.2 |
| - Score: 2 |
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