Posted Oct 11, 2012 21:11 UTC (Thu) by arnd (subscriber, #8866)
In reply to: An f2fs teardown by skitching
Parent article: An f2fs teardown
A few replies to each of your comments:
* Wear leveling usually works by having a pool of available erase blocks in the drive. When you write to a new location, the drive takes on block out of that pool and writes the data there. When the drive thinks you are done writing to one block, it cleans up any partially written data and puts a different block back into the pool.
* f2fs tries to group writes into larger operations of at least page size (16KB or more) to be efficient, current FTLs are horribly bad at 4KB page size writes. It also tries to fill erase blocks (multiples of 2MB) in the order that the devices can handle.
* logfs actually works on block devices but hasn't been actively worked on over the last few years. f2fs also promises better performance by using only 6 erase blocks concurrently rather than 12 in the case of logfs. A lot of the underlying principles are the same though.
* The "industry" is moving away from raw flash interfaces towards eMMC and related technologies (UFS, SD, ...). We are not going back to raw flash any time soon, which is unfortunate for a number of reasons but also has a few significant advantages. Having the FTL take care of bad block management and wear leveling is one such advantage, at least if they get it right.
Posted Oct 16, 2012 21:01 UTC (Tue) by travelsn (guest, #48694)
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But are there processor out there that can boot from FTL enabled flash don't we still need raw NAND for boot device?
An f2fs teardown
Posted Oct 16, 2012 23:53 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
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> But are there processor out there that can boot from FTL enabled flash
The OMAP3 in my phone boots from the micro-SD card. It reads from the blocks that a file would be stored in if it were the first file copied onto a newly formated VFAT partition (it doesn't parse the FAT, it just *knows* what to read).
So yes: processors can boot from all sorts of things.
An f2fs teardown
Posted Oct 17, 2012 12:14 UTC (Wed) by etienne (subscriber, #25256)
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> So yes: processors can boot from all sorts of things.
In fact OMAP3 boots from an internal ROM and can chain-load other boot device.
It would be so nice if that ROM would also contain a description of all the devices on this particular system-on-chip...
An f2fs teardown
Posted Dec 22, 2012 22:38 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
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> It reads from the blocks that a file would be stored in if it were the first file copied onto a newly formated VFAT partition (it doesn't parse the FAT, it just *knows* what to read).
To avoid this kludge, starting from version 4.3 e-MMC chips feature two 128K boot partitions with a simplified access procedure: simplified for ROMs.
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