UBIFS: add brief documentation

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Hunter <ext-adrian.hunter@nokia.com>

1 files changed, 164 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.txt
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+Introduction
+=============
+
+UBIFS file-system stands for UBI File System. UBI stands for "Unsorted
+Block Images". UBIFS is a flash file system, which means it is designed
+to work with flash devices. It is important to understand, that UBIFS
+is completely different to any traditional file-system in Linux, like
+Ext2, XFS, JFS, etc. UBIFS represents a separate class of file-systems
+which work with MTD devices, not block devices. The other Linux
+file-system of this class is JFFS2.
+
+To make it more clear, here is a small comparison of MTD devices and
+block devices.
+
+1 MTD devices represent flash devices and they consist of eraseblocks of
+  rather large size, typically about 128KiB. Block devices consist of
+  small blocks, typically 512 bytes.
+2 MTD devices support 3 main operations - read from some offset within an
+  eraseblock, write to some offset within an eraseblock, and erase a whole
+  eraseblock. Block  devices support 2 main operations - read a whole
+  block and write a whole block.
+3 The whole eraseblock has to be erased before it becomes possible to
+  re-write its contents. Blocks may be just re-written.
+4 Eraseblocks become worn out after some number of erase cycles -
+  typically 100K-1G for SLC NAND and NOR flashes, and 1K-10K for MLC
+  NAND flashes. Blocks do not have the wear-out property.
+5 Eraseblocks may become bad (only on NAND flashes) and software should
+  deal with this. Blocks on hard drives typically do not become bad,
+  because hardware has mechanisms to substitute bad blocks, at least in
+  modern LBA disks.
+
+It should be quite obvious why UBIFS is very different to traditional
+file-systems.
+
+UBIFS works on top of UBI. UBI is a separate software layer which may be
+found in drivers/mtd/ubi. UBI is basically a volume management and
+wear-leveling layer. It provides so called UBI volumes which is a higher
+level abstraction than a MTD device. The programming model of UBI devices
+is very similar to MTD devices - they still consist of large eraseblocks,
+they have read/write/erase operations, but UBI devices are devoid of
+limitations like wear and bad blocks (items 4 and 5 in the above list).
+
+In a sense, UBIFS is a next generation of JFFS2 file-system, but it is
+very different and incompatible to JFFS2. The following are the main
+differences.
+
+* JFFS2 works on top of MTD devices, UBIFS depends on UBI and works on
+  top of UBI volumes.
+* JFFS2 does not have on-media index and has to build it while mounting,
+  which requires full media scan. UBIFS maintains the FS indexing
+  information on the flash media and does not require full media scan,
+  so it mounts many times faster than JFFS2.
+* JFFS2 is a write-through file-system, while UBIFS supports write-back,
+  which makes UBIFS much faster on writes.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS supports on-the-flight compression which makes
+it possible to fit quite a lot of data to the flash.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS is tolerant of unclean reboots and power-cuts.
+It does not need stuff like ckfs.ext2. UBIFS automatically replays its
+journal and recovers from crashes, ensuring that the on-flash data
+structures are consistent.
+
+UBIFS scales logarithmically (most of the data structures it uses are
+trees), so the mount time and memory consumption do not linearly depend
+on the flash size, like in case of JFFS2. This is because UBIFS
+maintains the FS index on the flash media. However, UBIFS depends on
+UBI, which scales linearly. So overall UBI/UBIFS stack scales linearly.
+Nevertheless, UBI/UBIFS scales considerably better than JFFS2.
+
+The authors of UBIFS believe, that it is possible to develop UBI2 which
+would scale logarithmically as well. UBI2 would support the same API as UBI,
+but it would be binary incompatible to UBI. So UBIFS would not need to be
+changed to use UBI2
+
+
+Mount options
+=============
+
+(*) == default.
+
+norm_unmount (*)        commit on unmount; the journal is committed
+                        when the file-system is unmounted so that the
+                        next mount does not have to replay the journal
+                        and it becomes very fast;
+fast_unmount            do not commit on unmount; this option makes
+                        unmount faster, but the next mount slower
+                        because of the need to replay the journal.
+
+
+Quick usage instructions
+========================
+
+The UBI volume to mount is specified using "ubiX_Y" or "ubiX:NAME" syntax,
+where "X" is UBI device number, "Y" is UBI volume number, and "NAME" is
+UBI volume name.
+
+Mount volume 0 on UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs:
+$ mount -t ubifs ubi0_0 /mnt/ubifs
+
+Mount "rootfs" volume of UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs ("rootfs" is volume
+name):
+$ mount -t ubifs ubi0:rootfs /mnt/ubifs
+
+The following is an example of the kernel boot arguments to attach mtd0
+to UBI and mount volume "rootfs":
+ubi.mtd=0 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs
+
+
+Module Parameters for Debugging
+===============================
+
+When UBIFS has been compiled with debugging enabled, there are 3 module
+parameters that are available to control aspects of testing and debugging.
+The parameters are unsigned integers where each bit controls an option.
+The parameters are:
+
+debug_msgs      Selects which debug messages to display, as follows:
+
+                Message Type                            Flag value
+
+                General messages                        1
+                Journal messages                        2
+                Mount messages                          4
+                Commit messages                         8
+                LEB search messages                     16
+                Budgeting messages                      32
+                Garbage collection messages             64
+                Tree Node Cache (TNC) messages          128
+                LEB properties (lprops) messages        256
+                Input/output messages                   512
+                Log messages                            1024
+                Scan messages                           2048
+                Recovery messages                       4096
+
+debug_chks      Selects extra checks that UBIFS can do while running:
+
+                Check                                   Flag value
+
+                General checks                          1
+                Check Tree Node Cache (TNC)             2
+                Check indexing tree size                4
+                Check orphan area                       8
+                Check old indexing tree                 16
+                Check LEB properties (lprops)           32
+                Check leaf nodes and inodes             64
+
+debug_tsts      Selects a mode of testing, as follows:
+
+                Test mode                               Flag value
+
+                Force in-the-gaps method                2
+                Failure mode for recovery testing       4
+
+For example, set debug_msgs to 5 to display General messages and Mount
+messages.
+
+
+References
+==========
+
+UBIFS documentation and FAQ/HOWTO at the MTD web site:
+http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs.html
+http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/ubifs.html