Littlefs – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers

Re:Littlefs – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for mic... by e63f67dd-065b on Monday December 11, 2023 @02:50AM (#38598508)

Not so sure about the tar part, but the append-only nature is actually really well-known: look up log-structured filesystems, where all operations append to the log and GC comes to clean up stale data later. I’m in the middle of writing a log-structured disk, and it’s really nice to work with. You get many things like clones, snapshots, etc for free.

The replay problem is usually solved with periodic checkpoints of your map, and a checkpoint on shutdown. This way you only ever replay on failure, at which point performance doesn’t matter as much.

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Re:Littlefs – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for mic... by yjftsjthsd-h on Monday December 11, 2023 @03:00AM (#38598555)

Yeah, knowing there were filesystems designed like that on purpose made me feel better about it:) And once you get over the initial weirdness, the ability to get any version of any file is pretty nice. Though my favorite angle is that if you can live with just burning space[0], it makes the thing so easy to implement:)

[0] To be fair, a huge caveat.

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