Samsung debuts F2FS file system for solid state disks

Samsung introduced F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System), a new file system designed to improve the longevity and performance of NAND flash memory based storage devices. The file system and all related tools are released under the GNU GPL v2 license at SourceForge. So far, the file system appears to be concentrating on Linux support, and at present there's no support for checking and repairing the file system in the event of a system crash.

Dubbed the Flash-Friendly File System, or F2FS, and developed by Samsung's Jaegeuk Kim, the new file system attempts to address some of the issues with using formats designed for spinning-disk devices on solid-state drives including those that lead to performance-sapping cleaning cycles and loss of throughput over time.

'Since [SSDs] are known to have different characteristics from the conventional rotational disks, a file system, an upper layer to the storage device, should adapt to the changes from the sketch,' Kim explains in a patch notification for the file system. 'F2FS is a new file system carefully designed for the 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.

'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.'

Source: Bit Tech