Unified Flash File System

Epitech Innovative project forum

William — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:36:00 +0100

Today and tomorrow we will present our project at the EIP forum. It takes place at Epitech Paris.

Our progress in UFFS with Microsoft Windows CE

William — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:29:00 +0200

These last days our team has been working on UFFS with Microsoft Windows CE.
We now are indeed able to directly control the nand flash; it has been done with the modification of the drivers according to the fal/fmd model. The patch will be published as soon as possible.

We also have been working on two subjects:

UBI
FSD port of UBIFS

We will soon begin the UBIFS tests by using nand images, while waiting that UBI will be usable on Microsoft Windows CE.

New hardware to test

William — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:25:00 +0200

We are always open for new opportunities to get some new hardware to test our project.

Our school, Epitech just provides us a new Solid State Drive for a few months. This is an OCZ SATA II 2.5" SSD Solid Series 120GB.

Windows CE 6.0 Port Status and Flash Drivers

Corentin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:40:00 +0200

We recently started to port UBIFS to Microsoft Windows CE.

It's a lot of work, even if the API is close to Win32 API, and the compiler is the same (MSVC).

We recently started to port UBIFS to Microsoft Windows CE.

It's a lot of work, even if the API is close to Win32 API, and the compiler is the same (MSVC).

Here is the current status:

ebm.dll - build
- ebm file interface - done, need testing
- ebm nand interface - todo
ubifs.dll - build
uffs.dll (File System Driver, using ubifs.dll) - todo
mkfs.uffs.exe - todo
mkebm - todo

We are currently working on two AT91SAM9261 with BSP from Adeneo.

One of the challenge was accessing to the Nand Flash driver directly, but keeping the functionalities of the storage manager.

There is two way to do Nand Flash drivers on Windows CE:

Flash Driver FAL and FMD Model (old)
Flash Driver MDD and PDD Model (new)

The drivers provided in AT91SAM9261 BSP is using the FAL/FMD Model. But Microsoft provide a FmdWrapper to use the MDD/PDD model. A PDD driver provide ioctl for direct access, using that, it'll be easy to create a dev-wince-pdd.c for EBM.

Opening the project to the community

William — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:42:00 +0200

The timeline was planning the opening of the project in June 2009.
This is the end of June, so it's time for us to open the git repository.

The git repository is here: http://git.uffs.org/

The master branch is of course the reference branch. As you may know, the project is for the moment working in read only mode. Because UFFS is based on UBIFS, you will be able to write on your device with UBIFS tools. It's a starting point to test the UFFS project.

The documentation is filled weeks after weeks, and we hope you will help us improve it.

The project is opening mailing lists, checkout the contact page to have more details.

Even if the project is still in heavy development, some parts are currently usable for "real" things. Indeed, the UFFS project is composed by:

A portable UBIFS library: that can be used to access and modify ubifs volumes
libubiio: a library providing the same UBI API the kernel does
Erase Block Manager, a portable UBI-Like library

UFFS is an end of study project from Epitech school. It aims is to support any kind of flash memory devices on Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux.

Starting partnership with Adeneo

William — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:35:00 +0200

A small news to announce the starting of our informal partnership with Adeneo.

Indeed we received two ultra low-power, deterministic micro-controllers including NAND Flash and CompactFlash static memories. These two devices are a AT91SAM9261 from atmel.

It will permit us to test our project under Microsoft Windows CE and GNU/Linux.

Here is a small part of the device showing the Nandflash:

EBM is now working on Windows and FreeBSD

Corentin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:42:00 +0100

Here are small screenshots to show you that EBM now works on Microsoft Windows, and in FreeBSD!

Here are small screenshots to show you that EBM now works on Microsoft Windows.

And on FreeBSD!

libubiio 0.1 released!

Corentin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:29:00 +0100

UBIIO library is an user-space library which exports same functions in UBI GNU/Linux kernel module. It provides exactly the same API as the kernel does, that way kernel code can be used in user-space without any change. The code is widely inspired with libubi source code.

Documentation can be found at http://uffs.org/api/libubiio.html It is obviously the same as UBI kernel API, but there is actually few differences in return values.

Internal functions documentation can be found at http://uffs.org/api/libubiio_int.ht....

The code can be found at http://git.uffs.org/?p=libubiio.git

Opening communication

William — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:31:00 +0100

Some weeks ago we added a contact page on the website; some days after, we were surprised to receive our first contact from the University of Szeged. It was really a pleasure for us to see that some people could be interested in the project, or at least so early!

Since then, we decide to open an IRC channel to open the possibilities of communication.
Join us on irc.freenode.net #uffs.

UBI Patches merged in 2.6.29

Corentin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:19:00 +0100

Our first serie of patches for UBI have been merged in Linux and will be present in the 2.6.29 version.

Theses patches will allow us to make a fuse-based filesystem. Using fuse we will be able to debug the filesystem with valgrind or gdb, it will be a lot easier than directly hacking into the kernel. Moreover, a fuse filesystem is usable on MacOSX, GNU/Linux and *BSD.

Special thanks to Artem Bityutskiy (from Nokia) for his suggestions.