There are several challenges when making efficient use of flash memory for mass storage: the mismatch between the size of an erase block and a disk sector, the limited number of erase cycles per erase block, and the need for bad block handling on NAND chips. These differences are resolved by a Flash Translation Layer globally, or FTL.
A flash translation layer has the following features:
- Sub allocation: Filesystems work best with a small allocation unit, traditionally a 512-byte sector. This is much smaller than a flash erase block of 128 KiB or more. Therefore erase blocks have to be sub-divided into smaller units to avoid wasting large amounts of space.
- Garbage collection: A consequence of sub-allocation is that an erase block will contain a mixture of good data and stale data after the filesystem has been in use for a while. Since we can only free up whole erase blocks, the only way to reclaim the free space is to coalesce the good data into one place and return the now empty erase block to the free list: this is garbage collection, and is usually implemented as a background thread.
- Wear leveling: There is a limit on the number of erase cycles for each block. To maximize the lifespan of a chip, it is important to move data around so that each block is erased roughly the same number of times.
- Bad block handling: On NAND flash chips, you have to avoid using any block marked bad and also mark good blocks as bad if they cannot be erased.
- Robustness: Embedded devices may be powered off or reset without warning, so any filesystem should be able to cope without corruption, usually by incorporating a journal or log of transactions.
There are several ways to deploy the flash translation layer:
- In the filesystem: as with JFFS2, YAFFS2, and UBIFS
- In the block device driver: the UBI driver, on which UBIFS depends, implements some aspects of a flash translation layer
- In the device controller: as with managed flash devices
When the flash translation layer is in the filesystem or the block driver, the code is part of the kernel and so it is open source, meaning that we can see how it works and we can expect that it will be improved over time. On the other hand, the FTL is inside a managed flash device; it is hidden from view and we cannot verify whether or not it works as we would want. Not only that, but putting the FTL into the disk controller means that it misses out on information that is held at the filesystem layer such as which sectors belong to files that have been deleted and so do not contain useful data anymore. The latter problem is solved by adding commands that pass this information between the filesystem and the device I will describe in the section on the TRIM command later, but the question of code visibility remains. If you are using managed flash, you just have to choose a manufacturer you can trust.