What about the flash patent?

Posted Mar 3, 2009 15:08 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: What about the flash patent? by njs
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

The flash patent is problematic, and I did kind of gloss over it. Any flash array that comes with a translation layer is not an issue - or, more to the point, it's an issue for the people who shipped the FTL. But embedded systems, in particular, do deal with flash without a translation layer using filesystems like yaffs, jffs2, and UBI (UBI being, essentially, a flash translation layer).

My immediate sense is that this patent fails the obviousness test. You have an operating system working with one block size, and a storage system which forces a much larger block size. Of course you need an impedance-matching layer in the middle. This was inherent in the medium from the release of the first array. But, of course, I'm not the person you want to get that sort of advice from...