Due to its attractive characteristics in terms of performance, weight and
power consumption, NAND flash memory became the main non volatile memory (NVM)
in embedded systems. Those NVMs also present some specific
characteristics/constraints: good but asymmetric I/O performance, limited
lifetime, write/erase granularity asymmetry, etc. Those peculiarities are
either managed in hardware for flash disks (SSDs, SD cards, USB sticks, etc.)
or in software for raw embedded flash chips. When managed in software, flash
algorithms and structures are implemented in a specific flash file system
(FFS). In this paper, we present a performance study of the most widely used
FFSs in embedded Linux: JFFS2, UBIFS,and YAFFS. We show some very particular
behaviors and large performance disparities for tested FFS operations such as
mounting, copying, and searching file trees, compression, etc.Comment: Embed With Linux, Lorient : France (2012