On Friday, Jaegeuk Kim from Samsung revealed on the Linux kernel mailing list a new open-source file system for NAND flash storage devices called the Flash-Friendly File System, or F2FS.
Last week Kim said the company chose a log-structured file system (LFS) approach, which it adapted for new form factors like SSDs, SD cards and more. In the process, Samsung fixed some of the known issues surrounding the older log-structured file systems including the snowball effect of wandering trees and high cleaning overhead.
"Because a NAND-based storage device shows different characteristics according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme aka FTL, we add various parameters not only for configuring on-disk layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms," Kim added.
The new file system arrives in the form of 16 patches, adding around 13,000 lines of new code to the Linux kernel tree. This will make it easy to integrate the new file system into Android which commands the majority of the smartphone market. The system's Linux-based roots also means it will more likely be adopted by NAND flash device OEMs that may benefit from F2FS.
"Sweet, a new Linux file system from Samsung that is faster than existing ones when running on flash storage devices, submitted in a clean, easy-to-apply manner," said Greg KH, the lead Linux kernel developer. "This will be great for Android-based systems."
To get F2FS, type in the following:
# mkfs.f2fs /dev/sdb1
# mount -t f2fs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/f2fs
For more information, check out the mailing list entry here.
