LogFS
log-structured file system
LogFS is a Linux log-structured and scalable flash file system, intended for use on large devices of flash memory. It is written by Jörn Engel and in part sponsored by the CE Linux Forum.
LogFS was introduced in the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.34, released on May 16, 2010. It was removed from the codebase during the merge window of version 4.10, in December 2016, because it was "unmaintained for years and seemingly unused".
History
As of November 2008, LogFS was mature enough to pass its entire test suite, and was subsequently included in the mainline Linux kernel, marked as 'experimental', in version 2.6.34 released on May 16, 2010. However, it did not attract a large user base and was removed from the kernel in December 2016.
Operation
LogFS was motivated by the difficulties of JFFS2 with larger flash-memory drives. LogFS stores the inode tree on the drive; JFFS2 does not, which requires it to scan the entire drive at mount and cache the entire tree in RAM. For larger drives, the scan can take dozens of seconds and the tree can take a significant amount of main memory. LogFS avoids these penalties, but it does do more work while the system is running and uses some of the drive's space for holding the inode tree.
LogFS stores a file's inode tree on the drive, which means on a write to the file, each ancestor node in the tree must be rewritten.
The public source identifies “LogFS” as log-structured file system. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around LogFS, log-structured and file.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q849005. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2016 and 2008.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “LogFS” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.