Reviewing new possibilities for flash filesystems – My slides at ELCE 2008
With the release of Linux 2.6.27, including the new UBIFS filesystem for MTD storage, embedded Linux system developers now have multiple choices for their flash storage devices. As far as it is concerned, JFFS2 has also been improved and now has support for LZO compression, which makes uncompressing faster. So, how to choose between JFFS2, YAFFS2, and UBIFS?
To help our customers and the community make the right decision, I measured how these filesystems compare in terms of mount time, access time, read and write speed, as well as CPU usage in several corner cases and with different flash chip sizes.
I showed the results during the Embedded Linux Conference Europe event. Besides sharing lessons learned from these experiments, my presentation also introduced each filesystem and its implementation. I also gave advice for flash based block storage (such as Compact Flash and Solid State disks), to reduce the number of writes and avoid damaging flash blocks.
As usual, Bootlin slides are available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license: flash-filesystems.pdf (PDF), flash-filesystems.odp (Open Document Format).
The main finding is that UBIFS outperforms both JFFS2 and YAFFS2 in almost all corner cases. As shown by the benchmarks, it has consistently good mount time, and read/write performance. If your products are using a recent kernel, and are still based on JFFS2, you should definitely try UBIFS and get significant performance benefits, in particular for boot time, as mounting a JFFS2 root filesystem can take several seconds!
The advent of UBIFS also questions the relevance of YAFFS2. YAFFS2 used to be a good alternative to JFFS2, but unlike UBIFS, it doesn’t support compression. Then, why choose YAFFS2, when a apparently superior alternative is available?
The only case in which JFFS2 can still make sense if when you have very small partitions, sizing just a few megabytes. In this case, the overhead from UBI, the erase-block management layer below UBIFS, is no longer negligible. You will be able to pack much less data than with JFFS2. In this case, you can still improve JFFS2’s performance by using some of its new features (more details in the presentation).
SquashFS is also another great alternative, as shown by my benchmarks. It’s true it is a block filesystem, but since it is read-only, and there is no problem to use it on a write-once mtdblock device. You should really consider it for the read-only parts in your system, though it is advisable to use it on top of UBI, to make its blocks participate to wear-leveling and bad block management. Again, you will find more details in my presentation.
The presentation also mentions LogFS, which is also a promising filesystem for flash storage. Unfortunately, LogFS is not available yet for recent kernels. Stay tuned and I will benchmark it as soon this situation changes.
