Embedded Software Insight
Picture this. You are on the verge of sending an ambitious design out for production. As the project comes to an end, you should feel a sense of victory. Instead, the atmosphere is tense. You should have known that 128Mbit of data storage would be too tight. Your heart is racing. NOR flash with higher … Read more
Those of you who have spent even the slightest amount of time digging around for insights on embedded storage technologies know this: the subspace of the Internet devoted to this particular topic is flooded with short articles comparing NOR and NAND flash technologies. Some are very well-written and genuinely enlightening. But all too often, the … Read more
The previous article of this introduction series on flash storage was all about two things: the daunting complexity of flash memory and the importance of proper flash management. In essence, it was a warning: blindly heading down the flash road is calling for trouble. Said. Understood. Now what? At this point, a lot of questions … Read more
This article is the first of an introduction series about flash memory. A high-level introduction shall we say. Not the kind that takes you straight to the electron and drags you through the depths of quantum physics. No. The purpose of this series is to provide useful information from an operational perspective. Things that you … Read more
In the previous article of this series on TSFS snapshots, we have shown how snapshots can be used to design a simple yet robust firmware upgrade procedure. This time, we go from design to implementation, delving into the specifics of the TSFS snapshot management interface. More specifically, we show how we can meet our initial … Read more
This article is the first part of a twofold series on one of the most unique TSFS feature: snapshotting. In this first article, we show how snapshots can ease application development, providing the application designer with an elegant way of handling concurrent read/write accesses. We also introduce a simple firmware update example, to help us … Read more
In the previous article of this threefold series on fail-safe design, we have seen how TSFS transactions can be used to build fail-safe applications by protecting individual files against data and metadata corruption. In this third article, we now show that TSFS transactions go beyond preserving file-level integrity, and can also be used to enforce … Read more
In the first article of this three-part series on fail-safe design, we have spent some time discussing how unexpected failures can threaten the integrity of an application by corrupting both the application data and file system metadata. This time, we see how an application can be designed to withstand such unforeseen events, using TSFS transactions. … Read more
This is the first article of a three-part series on fail-safe, storage-related application design. The first part of the series lays out the fundamental problem of unexpected failures and briefly discusses partial solutions. The second part introduces the TREEspan File System(TSFS) transactions as a means to protect the application against such potentially disruptive events. Finally, … Read more
Last week was one of pride and excitement for the JBLopen’s development team as we released our latest product, the TREEspan File System (TSFS). After the official announcement and presentation, we feel the need to introduce the newcomer in a more personal way, such as we see it from the inside. Above all, we would … Read more