NANDFS: a flexible flash file system for RAM-constrained systems

NANDFS is a flash file system that exposes a memory-performance tradeoff to system integrators. The file system can be configured to use a large amount of RAM, in which case it delivers excellent performance. In particular, when NANDFS is configured with the same amount of RAM that YAFFS2 uses, the performance of the two file systems is comparable (YAFFS2 is a file system that is widely used in embedded Linux and other embedded environments). But YAFFS2 and other state-of-the-art flash file systems allocate RAM dynamically and do not provide the system builder with a way to limit the amount ofmemory that they allocate. NANDFS, on the other hand, allows the system builder to configure it to use a specific amount of RAM. The performance of NANDFS degrades when the amount of RAM it uses shrinks, but the degradation is graceful, not catastrophic. NANDFS is able to provide this flexibility thanks to a novel data structure that combines a coarsegrained logical-to-physical mapping with a log-structured file system.