FTL of compact flash card

[Henrik Nordstrom]

On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, Charles Manning wrote:

> >From what I read here, what you want is a mapping that provides a block-wise 
> interface to the flash.
> 
> JFFSx is a file system. That will not do what you want.
> 
> What you need is some block-like FTL like NFTL or whatever goes on inside a 
> Compact Flash or ATA card. I am not aware of any open source code that will 
> do what you want. As far as I can tell all this code is fiercely guarded by 
> companies like Sandisk and MSystems.

There is at least 4 such layers in the Linux MTD kernel sources:

  NFTL. Compatible with the NFTL design and implementation by MSystems for
their DOC devices. However, any use of NFTL on other devices will likely
be in violation to their patent unless a license is aquired.

  FTL. Also covered by a M-Systems patent with a special grant for use in
PCMCIA. See ftl.c for details.

  mtdblock, linear block level access to flash memory. No wear leveling as
far as I know.

  The journalling level of jffs. Has wear leveling.

  The journalling level of jffs2. Has wear leveling.


For most purposes I suspect actually using the JFFS2 filesystem is the
best fit. Gives you efficient wear leveling (inlcluding not caring about
deleted content) and reasonable data integrity protection.

Regards
Henrik