All the way back in 2012, Samsung created a new file system purpose-built for flash-based storage, called ‘F2FS‘. It’s typically faster on smartphones than the ext4 file system that most Android devices use, but it has suffered from reliability issues over the years. Google apparently thinks it’s ready for prime-time though, as the Pixel 3 and 3 XL both use F2FS for local storage.
The technical details of F2FS are a bit complicated – some of the features include multi-head logging, TRIM/FITRIM support, and an adaptive logging scheme. The main advantage compared to ext4 is improved performance, specifically with random write speeds. It’s also less prone to slowing down when limited free storage space is available.
The Pixel 3 isn’t the first Android phone to use F2FS, as evidenced by its website.
I think it’s time to completely ignore magnetic hard drives for development of new file systems and algorithms and focus only on solid state media such as nvme or nvdimm, or even better couple storage directly with L2 or L3 cache controller so there’s no need for crappy protocols that need any driver, just address memory by address.
That already exists on Linux: F2FS for raw flash, NOVA (https://lwn.net/Articles/729812/) for Optane style NVRAM. However, there are still approximately a gorillion HDDs out there, and traditional filesystems work well within virtual machine disk images (even if the backing store is ZFS or a fancy SAN). We also have next-gen filesystems like bcachefs/BtrFS/ZFS/HAMMER2 that make strong use of SSDs and HDDs in combination.
I agree. In the same way that tape drives have entirely different data structures for managing their storage, spinning magnetic media and solid state storage are different enough to warrant separate approaches.
Do you really? Agentj seems to propose entirely abandoning the development of fs for HDDs, while you seem to propose separate development for HDDs and SSDs. I don’t really agree with the former, but can get behind the latter…
Thing is, we store, well, our civilisation primarily on hard drives. Sure, SSDs are convenient, in the way airplanes are and how they are primarily used by people …but the bulk cargo is carried by ships; if airplanes dissapeared, it would be an inconvenience; if ships dissapeared, it would mean a collapse of our modern civilisation.
(sorry it’s not a car analogy
)
Strange, does Samsung themselves use it?