David Woodhouse, project leader of the Linux Memory Technology Device project, has just issued this announcement of the arrival of “JFFS2” — version 2 of the Journaling Flash File System for Embedded Linux . . .

Well, it's been almost a week since the latest stupid bug was found in the JFFS2 code, so I suppose it's time to admit to the world that it exists.

JFFS2, developed by Red Hat, is a complete reimplementation of a journaling filesystem for FLASH devices, based on the original JFFS from Axis Communications AB.

Improvements of JFFS2 over the original JFFS include:

• Improved wear levelling and garbage collection performance.
  
• Compression
  
• Improved RAM footprint and response to system memory pressure.
  
• Improved concurrency and support for suspending flash erases
  
• Support for hard links.

You can get it from anonymous CVS:

• cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/home/cvs login (password: anoncvs)

• cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/home/cvs co mtd

The only platform currently supported is Linux 2.4. A port to eCos is likely to happen quite soon.

JFFS2 filesystem images of the current Familiar distribution for the Compaq iPAQ, along with appropriate kernels, are available here.

 
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