A Self-Description File System for NAND Flash Memory

Conventional file systems for harddisk drive cannot be applied to NAND flash memory, because the physical characteristics of NAND flash memory differs from those of harddisk drive. To address this problem, various file systems with better reliability and efficiency have also been developed recently. However, those file systems have inherent overheads for updating the file's metadata pages, because those file systems save file's meta-data and data separately. Furthermore, those file systems have a critical reliability problem: file systems fail when either a page in meta-data of a file system or a file itself fails. In this paper, we propose a self-description page technique and In Memory Core File System technique to address these efficiency and reliability problems, and develop SDFS(Self-Description File System) newly. SDFS can be safely recovered, although some pages fail, and improves write and read performance by 36% and 15%, respectively, and reduces mounting time by 1/20 compared with YAFFS2.