Support read-only block filesystems on MTD flash
- Summary
- support read-only block filesystems on MTD flash
- Proposer
- Michael Opdenacker <michael@free-electrons.com>
Description
Our flash filesystem benchmarks have shown that SquashFS exhibits great mount time and good read speeds compared to the other flash filesystems (jffs2, yaffs2 and ubifs).
See http://free-electrons.com/pub/conferences/2008/elce/flash-filesystems.pdf
SquashFS is a block filesystem, but since it is read-only, it can be also used on a /dev/mtdblock<x> device, because it will never attempt to write on any block. The same applies to other block filesystems, provided they are mounted in read-only mode.
The problem is that /dev/mtdblock<x>, the block interface to MTD device <x>, is not bad-block aware, and therefore can't be used reliably to mount read-only block filesystems. It will only work if you are lucky to have a board with no bad MTD blocks, as we were when we first benchmarked SquashFS on MTD.
The goals of this project are to make it possible to use read-only filesystems in a reliable way on top of MTD flash storage.
This could be achieved in multiple ways:
- By implementing a bad-block aware block device of top of MTD,
perhaps not a generic one, but limited to the needs of read-only filesystems.
- By implementing a generic block device on top of UBI, for systems which
use UBI to implement global wear leveling (without UBI, wear leveling can only be implemented locally, by each filesystem).
- If SquashFS is identified as a priority, another idea would be
to implement SquashFS back-ends for MTD and UBI. The solution wouldn't benefit other filesystems though.
The expected benefits are:
- Ability to use Squashfs on MTD flash: tiny mount time,
good compression, good read performance.
- Ability to experiment with newer filesystems such as btrfs,
in read-only mode, of course. btrfs shows great performance on flash based block storage (see http://elinux.org/images/d/d7/Elce2010-flash-filesystems.pdf).
- A read-write block device on top of UBI would allow to implement
hibernation to flash, in particular.
Related work
- 'ubiblk' patches were developed in 2008, but never made it into
mainline, and apparently haven't been heard of since then. We could revive this project.
- "Nand Flash Translation Layer" (NTFL) already exists in the Linux
kernel, to provide a block layer on NAND flash, but its usability is restricted by software patents.
- It is already possible to use a reliable block device on UBI,
but it is through MTD emulation: MTD -> UBI -> gluebi -> MTD -> mtdblock This is probably too complex to be efficient.
Scope
Here is the expected amount of work for the first two parts:
- bad-block aware MTD block device for read-only filesystems
4 weeks
- UBI block device:
4 weeks
These tasks would be implemented in close relationship with the MTD and UBI developer communities, to minimize mainstreaming costs.
Contractor Candidates
- Linux MTD developers
- Philip Lougher, SquashFS developer
- Development could be taken care of by my company (Free Electrons)