Samsung creates open source file system F2FS for NAND flash storage

Samsung has come up with a new “flash-friendly” file system for NAND flash memory-based storage devices such as SSDs, SD cards and eMMCs. Called F2FS, the file system tackles problems associated with older file systems intended mainly for older physical storage systems, such as issues in accessing data stored on specific, physical locations on the drive itself, and the read/write limits on flash storage. Flash memory-based storage devices face no such problems as they are a form of solid-state storage and F2FS takes advantage of this.Jaegeuk Kim of Samsung states that the file system has been optimised for NAND flash memory-based storage devices. “We chose a log structure file system approach, but we tried to adapt it to the new form of storage. Also we remedy some known issues of the very old log structured file system, such as snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead,” he wrote on the <a href="https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/5/205">Linux Kernel Mailing List.“Because a NAND-based storage device shows different characteristics according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme aka FTL, we add various parameters not only for configuring on-disk layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms,” he added.Click here for full story