CELF Project Proposal/UBIFS mount time speedups

Summary 

Improve UBIFS mounting time

Proposer 

Tim Bird

Description

UBIFS is a next-generation flash-based file system for Linux. It is a read/write file system, which supports compression and has good performance. However, it's mount times are not very good. This affects overall Linux boot time, for a UBIFS-based embedded system.

The purpose of this project would be to investigate mount performance issues, and try to resolve them. One suggestion is to keep the bad block table on flash, instead of re-scanning it on every boot. It is not known if algorithms to do this are covered by existing flash management patents.

Related work

• UBIFS
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBIFS
  • http://lwn.net/Articles/276025/
• UBI2
  • see portions of http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.txt
• Mount times
  • http://osl.sed.hu/wiki/ubifs/index.php/Mount_results
  • http://elinux.org/images/f/f8/CELFJamboree30-UBIFS_update.pdf

Scope 

This project might take about 4 months

Comments

Toshiba may already be working on this project.