• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.191-198
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• 2009

The FAT (File Allocation Table) compatible file system has been widely used in mobile devices and memory cards because of its data exchangeability among numerous platforms recognizing the FAT file system. By the way. modern embedded systems have tough demands for instant power failure recovery and superior performance for multimedia applications. The key issue is how to achieve the goals of superior write performance and instant booting capability while controlling compatibility issues. To achieve the goals while controlling compatibility issues. we devised a temporary meta-data journaling scheme for a FAT compatible file system. Benchmark results of the scheme implemented in a FAT compatible file system shows that it really improves write performance of the FAT file system by converting small random write for meta-data update to a large sequential write in journaling area. Also, it provides natural way to implement the instant booting capability. Nevertheless, the file system compatibility is temporarily compromised by the scheme because it stores updated meta-data in the temporary journaling area rather than to their original locations. However, the compatibility can be fully recovered at any time by journal-flushing that copies meta-data in journaling area to their original locations. Generally, the journal-flushing is done before un-mounting a memory card so that it can be used in other mobile devices which recognized FAT file system but not the temporary meta-data journaling scheme.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.11_12
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• pp.587-597
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• 2005

Flash memory based embedded computing systems are becoming increasingly prevalent.These systems typically have to provide an instant start-up time. However, we observe that mounting a file system toy flash memory takes 1 to 25 seconds mainly depending on the flash capacity. Since the flash chip capacity is doubled in every year, this mounting time will soon become the most dominant reason of the delay of system start-up time Therefore, in this paper, we present instant mounting techniques for flash file systems by storing the In-memory file system metadata to flash memory when unmounting the file system and reloading the stored metadata quickly when mounting the file system. These metadata snapshot techniques are specifically developed for NOR- and NAND-type flash memories, while at the same time, overcoming their physical constraints. The proposed techniques check the validity of the stored snapshot and use the proposed fast trash recovery techniques when the snapshot is Invalid. Based on the experimental results, the proposed techniques can reduce the flash mounting time by about two orders of magnitude over the existing de facto standard flash file system, JFFS2.