[Updated 8:30am PDT] David Woodhouse, project leader of the Linux Memory Technology Device project, has provided this interesting news note regarding the inclusion of JFFS2 in the latest kernels . . .

Just thought I'd drop you a note to point out that JFFS2 has now been included in Linus' kernels. It's about six months old now, and is no longer considered to be experimental.

The traditional method of using Flash is to use a 'translation layer', which is a kind of journaling file system, to emulate a standard block device — and then to put another file system on top of that emulated block device. That approach is less efficient that the approach taken by JFFS2, which is to put a log-structured POSIX-compliant file system directly onto the flash chips. JFFS2 also does compression.

JFFS2 has been the file system used by the Familiar distribution on the Compaq iPAQ since version 0.4, released in May. It's also in use by a fair number of other projects.

An intersting paper about JFFS2 is available for download here (PDF); alternatively, an html version is available here.

 
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