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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." |
|
| Hmm... |
| By 1c3d0g on 2012-10-06 22:29:48 |
| ...didn't Sandisk invent their own "flash-optimized" FS not too long ago? What happened to that?!? :-O |
 - Score: 2 |
| Comment by shmerl |
| By shmerl on 2012-10-07 00:52:02 |
| Let's hope they'll provide all drivers (including Windows one), and no idiot will come up with some patents to disrupt it. It'll solve all the mess with FAT and co. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: What happened to nilfs? |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-07 04:45:10 |
|
> And what is the deal with linux and ZFS? Why not use the best fs? ZFS is definitely not the best choice for flash - media, plus it's very resource-hungry on the host - side of things, too. ZFS is plenty useful on a server, and even on a desktop it could possibly be useful, but it is not suitable for use in embedded devices with limited resources or devices where you simply have no need for all of its features. |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE: How does this FS compare to... |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-07 04:53:58 |
|
> ... 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? As far as I know both UBIFS and YAFFS are designed to be used with raw flash-chips whereas F2Fs is designed to work well in conjunction with flash-devices with FTL. The needs and optimization techniques are different and with careful planning of the filesystem the FTL can handle all the low-level details while still providing excellent speeds and reliability for a flash-friendly filesystem. The whole point as I see it is that this allows one to separate the actual low-level hardware details from the operation of the filesystem, allowing you to improve/work on either one of those separately without having to re-design the whole thing every single time or for every new development in the hardware. Edited 2012-10-07 04:54 UTC |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By butters on 2012-10-07 08:36:18 |
|
A log-structured filesystem is not necessarily a bad design choice for FTL volumes. You don't need to worry about wear-leveling, but you don't need to worry about spatial locality either, and you know that the FTL will override any attempts to do in-place updates. So you can only really optimize two things: allocating free (logical) blocks for writes, and indexing file extents for reads. Log-structured filesystems are as good as it gets for allocating free space (just continue writing where we left off), and they also avoid the fragmentation of files across many extents. The only thing one might want to do differently than a classic log-structured filesystem is to update the superblocks and inodes in-place and defer to the FTL's wear-leveling algorithm. These are fixed block-sized structures, so in-place updates are simple and copy-on-write is an unnecessary overhead. |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE: Comment by shmerl |
| By dsmogor on 2012-10-07 15:35:37 |
| Let's hope Samsung doesn't want to exercise any patents related to that. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Hmm... |
| By JAlexoid on 2012-10-07 16:20:06 |
| Microsoft's NIH syndrome happened. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: Someone needs to look up easyco.com |
| By WereCatf on 2012-10-07 17:21:27 |
|
> Flash is the only way to go. Has anyone here argued anything to the contrary or who are you directing your comment at? |
| - Score: 4 |
| RE[3]: Shhh!! Quiet... |
| By galvanash on 2012-10-07 21:02:31 |
| That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Someone needs to look up easyco.com |
| By rikkirakk on 2012-10-07 23:17:36 |
| It was spam. |
| - Score: 4 |
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