tiny firewall boxes

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 01:40:33PM -0700, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> Actually, one thing I've been wondering was whether anyone has
> experience with card-intended filesystems.
> It seems the more popular ones such as YAFFS2 or JAFFS2 require a
> special interface to the flash rather than just a cardreader, etc (or
> perhaps I'm just reading it wrong) which functions in block mode.
> 
> I haven't been able to find much support for flash-on-block devices,
> but it seems to me that with SSD's and flash-storage becoming more
> popular, questions of filesystems in relation to access times,
> data-integrity, and data-wearing become important.

This is what NilFS is targeting as far as I understand it.  Not entirely
sure though.  After all since there is no seek penalty, there is no
reason to not just write wherever you want.  No reason to try and avoid
fragmentation.

> In my case I'm just using ext3 as I still have need/use for unix file
> permissions, but I doubt that it's a great choice. Googling seems to
> show that most people seem to recommend just using FAT or possibly
> NTFS for compatability, but from a permissions angle that's not so
> useful.

FAT has no benefit whatsoever over ext3 as far as being nice to the flash
is concerned (FAT is probably worse).  The only benefit to FAT is that
just about everything can read it.  NTFS doesn't even have that, it
only has the advantage of being the only filesystem windows supports
with decent acceess controls and large file support.

> Anyone else have some knowledge along the areas of flash storage and
> filesystems? In my case I have an EEE with an internal SSD, and my
> user storage which automounts on login (pam-mount+UnionFS is AWESOME)
> from a flash card.

Well if the device appears as IDE or SATA, then treating it as such
probably makes sense, although you might want to avoid unnecesary writes.

If you have a raw flash chip access (through MTD) then using JFFS2 or
such makes sense.  They only make sense on raw flash chips though.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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