Q: Filesystem choice..

[Eric W. Biederman]

David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> writes:

> On Mon, 2004-01-26 at 02:23 -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> 
> Fix up some other assumptions about the first byte in any given page
> also being the first byte in a node, and fix up the garbage-collection
> which will need to have enough workspace to decompress and recompress
> the largest block it may encounter, and it should work.

Cool.  Then if it comes up I will look.
 
> > My real question here is how difficult is it to disable compression?
> > Or can compression be deliberately disabled on a per file basis?
> 
> It's not too hard. To disable it completely you just need to change a
> few #defines in os-linux.h. The support for disabling it on a per-file
> basis isn't complete, but there are flags allocated in the inode
> structure to keep track of it.

Nice.
 
> > I have a truly perverse case I would like to ask your opinion about.
> > A filesystem composed of 2 8K erase blocks?  That is one of the
> > weird special cases that flash chips often support.  I could
> > only store my parameter file in there but it would be interesting.
> 
> To be honest, at that size I'd just do it directly via /dev/mtd0. Put
> the file directly on the flash with a checksum. Alternate between the
> eraseblocks each time it changes, then erase the old copy.

Right that would work, and I might do that.  If could put a fs in
there I get some extensibility benefits.  As well as being able to
write a couple copies of my small file before I switch to the next
erase block.  The extensibility is that other pieces of firmware
could have their own files of settings, decoupling things a little bit.

If I could get the degenerate case to work without needing gross hacks
jffs2 would have scaled down to a useful level.

Primarily I am interested in not reinventing if I can, and it looks
like that may be a possibility.

> > And a last question. jffs2 rounds all erase blocks up to a common size
> > doesn't it?
> 
> Yes.

Thanks for information.

I'm not quite certain where I will go with this but it has made
where the trade offs pretty clear.

Eric