A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers (2017)

Re:A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrolle... by TickleSteve on Friday January 25, 2019 @04:56PM (#19002907)

Seems well thought through, but the concept of putting a general-purpose file system on an embedded microcontroller is a common mistake.

These are single-purpose systems, you don't need to use filenames and have POSIX semantics, you typically just need to put your data into a circular buffer on FLASH. The circular buffer (with checksummed elements) will take care of bad-block management and wear levelling for you.

I've seen this far too often, filesystems are not ideal for this class of system.

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Re:A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrolle... by diydsp on Saturday January 26, 2019 @12:17AM (#19004889)

i have the exact opposite opinion. such circular buffers only suit limited file system activities, such as logs. if you want editable config files of varying lengths, you need a real fs. i'll concede that features like directory structures and timestamps can be omitted though.

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Re:A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrolle... by TickleSteve on Tuesday January 29, 2019 @07:12PM (#19031275)

No, you can do log-structured BLOBs which essentially given you version control in a simple manner with circular buffers.

As for variable-length configs, yes, but you should always be allocating the worst-case (i.e. defined maximum), hence no need for variable length.

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