--- /dev/null
+Introduction
+=============
+
+UBIFS file-system stands for UBI File System. UBI stands for "Unsorted
+Block Images". UBIFS is a flash file system, which means it is designed
+to work with flash devices. It is important to understand, that UBIFS
+is completely different to any traditional file-system in Linux, like
+Ext2, XFS, JFS, etc. UBIFS represents a separate class of file-systems
+which work with MTD devices, not block devices. The other Linux
+file-system of this class is JFFS2.
+
+To make it more clear, here is a small comparison of MTD devices and
+block devices.
+
+1 MTD devices represent flash devices and they consist of eraseblocks of
+ rather large size, typically about 128KiB. Block devices consist of
+ small blocks, typically 512 bytes.
+2 MTD devices support 3 main operations - read from some offset within an
+ eraseblock, write to some offset within an eraseblock, and erase a whole
+ eraseblock. Block devices support 2 main operations - read a whole
+ block and write a whole block.
+3 The whole eraseblock has to be erased before it becomes possible to
+ re-write its contents. Blocks may be just re-written.
+4 Eraseblocks become worn out after some number of erase cycles -
+ typically 100K-1G for SLC NAND and NOR flashes, and 1K-10K for MLC
+ NAND flashes. Blocks do not have the wear-out property.
+5 Eraseblocks may become bad (only on NAND flashes) and software should
+ deal with this. Blocks on hard drives typically do not become bad,
+ because hardware has mechanisms to substitute bad blocks, at least in
+ modern LBA disks.
+
+It should be quite obvious why UBIFS is very different to traditional
+file-systems.
+
+UBIFS works on top of UBI. UBI is a separate software layer which may be
+found in drivers/mtd/ubi. UBI is basically a volume management and
+wear-leveling layer. It provides so called UBI volumes which is a higher
+level abstraction than a MTD device. The programming model of UBI devices
+is very similar to MTD devices - they still consist of large eraseblocks,
+they have read/write/erase operations, but UBI devices are devoid of
+limitations like wear and bad blocks (items 4 and 5 in the above list).
+
+In a sense, UBIFS is a next generation of JFFS2 file-system, but it is
+very different and incompatible to JFFS2. The following are the main
+differences.
+
+* JFFS2 works on top of MTD devices, UBIFS depends on UBI and works on
+ top of UBI volumes.
+* JFFS2 does not have on-media index and has to build it while mounting,
+ which requires full media scan. UBIFS maintains the FS indexing
+ information on the flash media and does not require full media scan,
+ so it mounts many times faster than JFFS2.
+* JFFS2 is a write-through file-system, while UBIFS supports write-back,
+ which makes UBIFS much faster on writes.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS supports on-the-flight compression which makes
+it possible to fit quite a lot of data to the flash.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS is tolerant of unclean reboots and power-cuts.
+It does not need stuff like fsck.ext2. UBIFS automatically replays its
+journal and recovers from crashes, ensuring that the on-flash data
+structures are consistent.
+
+UBIFS scales logarithmically (most of the data structures it uses are
+trees), so the mount time and memory consumption do not linearly depend
+on the flash size, like in case of JFFS2. This is because UBIFS
+maintains the FS index on the flash media. However, UBIFS depends on
+UBI, which scales linearly. So overall UBI/UBIFS stack scales linearly.
+Nevertheless, UBI/UBIFS scales considerably better than JFFS2.
+
+The authors of UBIFS believe, that it is possible to develop UBI2 which
+would scale logarithmically as well. UBI2 would support the same API as UBI,
+but it would be binary incompatible to UBI. So UBIFS would not need to be
+changed to use UBI2
+
+
+Mount options
+=============
+
+(*) == default.
+
+bulk_read read more in one go to take advantage of flash
+ media that read faster sequentially
+no_bulk_read (*) do not bulk-read
+no_chk_data_crc (*) skip checking of CRCs on data nodes in order to
+ improve read performance. Use this option only
+ if the flash media is highly reliable. The effect
+ of this option is that corruption of the contents
+ of a file can go unnoticed.
+chk_data_crc do not skip checking CRCs on data nodes
+compr=none override default compressor and set it to "none"
+compr=lzo override default compressor and set it to "lzo"
+compr=zlib override default compressor and set it to "zlib"
+
+
+Quick usage instructions
+========================
+
+The UBI volume to mount is specified using "ubiX_Y" or "ubiX:NAME" syntax,
+where "X" is UBI device number, "Y" is UBI volume number, and "NAME" is
+UBI volume name.
+
+Mount volume 0 on UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs:
+$ mount -t ubifs ubi0_0 /mnt/ubifs
+
+Mount "rootfs" volume of UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs ("rootfs" is volume
+name):
+$ mount -t ubifs ubi0:rootfs /mnt/ubifs
+
+The following is an example of the kernel boot arguments to attach mtd0
+to UBI and mount volume "rootfs":
+ubi.mtd=0 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs
+
+References
+==========
+
+UBIFS documentation and FAQ/HOWTO at the MTD web site:
+http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs.html
+http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/ubifs.html
Code Review / kvmfornfv.git / blobdiff