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-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 ckfs.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.
-
-norm_unmount (*) commit on unmount; the journal is committed
- when the file-system is unmounted so that the
- next mount does not have to replay the journal
- and it becomes very fast;
-fast_unmount do not commit on unmount; this option makes
- unmount faster, but the next mount slower
- because of the need to replay the journal.
-
-
-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
-
-
-Module Parameters for Debugging
-===============================
-
-When UBIFS has been compiled with debugging enabled, there are 3 module
-parameters that are available to control aspects of testing and debugging.
-The parameters are unsigned integers where each bit controls an option.
-The parameters are:
-
-debug_msgs Selects which debug messages to display, as follows:
-
- Message Type Flag value
-
- General messages 1
- Journal messages 2
- Mount messages 4
- Commit messages 8
- LEB search messages 16
- Budgeting messages 32
- Garbage collection messages 64
- Tree Node Cache (TNC) messages 128
- LEB properties (lprops) messages 256
- Input/output messages 512
- Log messages 1024
- Scan messages 2048
- Recovery messages 4096
-
-debug_chks Selects extra checks that UBIFS can do while running:
-
- Check Flag value
-
- General checks 1
- Check Tree Node Cache (TNC) 2
- Check indexing tree size 4
- Check orphan area 8
- Check old indexing tree 16
- Check LEB properties (lprops) 32
-
-debug_tsts Selects a mode of testing, as follows:
-
- Test mode Flag value
-
- Force in-the-gaps method 2
- Failure mode for recovery testing 4
-
-For example, set debug_msgs to 5 to display General messages and Mount
-messages.
-
-
-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