a5d614fbfb
The power-cycled-relocation test with random renames has been the most
aggressive test applied to littlefs so far, with:
- Random nested directory creation
- Random nested directory removal
- Random nested directory renames (this could make the
threaded linked-list very interesting)
- Relocating blocks every write (maximum wear-leveling)
- Incrementally cycling power every write
Also added a couple other tests to test_orphans and test_relocations.
The good news is the added testing worked well, it found quite a number
of complex and subtle bugs that have been difficult to find.
1. It's actually possible for our parent to be relocated and go out of
sync in lfs_mkdir. This can happen if our predecessor's predecessor
is our parent as we are threading ourselves into the filesystem's
threaded list. (note this doesn't happen if our predecessor _is_ our
parent, as we then update our parent in a single commit).
This is annoying because it only happens if our parent is a long (>1
pair) directory, otherwise we wouldn't need to catch relocations.
Fortunately we can reuse the internal open file/dir linked-list to
catch relocations easily, as long as we're careful to unhook our
parent whenever lfs_mkdir returns.
2. Even more surprising, it's possible for the child in lfs_remove
to be relocated while we delete the entry from our parent. This
can happen if we are our own parent's predecessor, since we need
to be updated then if our parent relocates.
Fortunately we can also hook into the open linked-list here.
Note this same issue was present in lfs_rename.
Fortunately, this means now all fetched dirs are hooked into the
open linked-list if they are needed across a commit. This means
we shouldn't need assumptions about tree movement for correctness.
3. lfs_rename("deja/vu", "deja/vu") with the same source and destination
was broken and tried to delete the entry twice.
4. Managing gstate deltas when we lose power during relocations was
broken. And unfortunately complicated.
The issue happens when we lose power during a relocation while
removing a directory.
When we remove a directory, we need to move the contents of its
gstate delta to another directory or we'll corrupt littlefs gstate.
(gstate is an xor of all deltas on the filesystem). We used to just
xor the gstate into our parent's gstate, however this isn't correct.
The gstate isn't built out of the directory tree, but rather out of
the threaded linked-list (which exists to make collecting this
gstate efficient).
Because we have to remove our dir in two operations, there's a point
were both the updated parent and child can exist in threaded
linked-list and duplicate the child's gstate delta.
.--------.
->| parent |-.
| gstate | |
.-| a |-'
| '--------'
| X <- child is orphaned
| .--------.
'>| child |->
| gstate |
| a |
'--------'
What we need to do is save our child's gstate and only give it to our
predecessor, since this finalizes the removal of the child.
However we still need to make valid updates to the gstate to mark
that we've created an orphan when we start removing the child.
This led to a small rework of how the gstate is handled. Now we have
a separation of the gpending state that should be written out ASAP
and the gdelta state that is collected from orphans awaiting
deletion.
5. lfs_deorphan wasn't actually able to handle deorphaning/desyncing
more than one orphan after a power-cycle. Having more than one orphan
is very rare, but of course very possible. Fortunately this was just
a mistake with using a break the in the deorphan, perhaps left from
v1 where multiple orphans weren't possible?
Note that we use a continue to force a refetch of the orphaned block.
This is needed in the case of a half-orphan, since the fetched
half-orphan may have an outdated tail pointer.
littlefs
A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers.
| | | .---._____
.-----. | |
--|o |---| littlefs |
--| |---| |
'-----' '----------'
| | |
Power-loss resilience - littlefs is designed to handle random power failures. All file operations have strong copy-on-write guarantees and if power is lost the filesystem will fall back to the last known good state.
Dynamic wear leveling - littlefs is designed with flash in mind, and provides wear leveling over dynamic blocks. Additionally, littlefs can detect bad blocks and work around them.
Bounded RAM/ROM - littlefs is designed to work with a small amount of memory. RAM usage is strictly bounded, which means RAM consumption does not change as the filesystem grows. The filesystem contains no unbounded recursion and dynamic memory is limited to configurable buffers that can be provided statically.
Example
Here's a simple example that updates a file named boot_count every time
main runs. The program can be interrupted at any time without losing track
of how many times it has been booted and without corrupting the filesystem:
#include "lfs.h"
// variables used by the filesystem
lfs_t lfs;
lfs_file_t file;
// configuration of the filesystem is provided by this struct
const struct lfs_config cfg = {
// block device operations
.read = user_provided_block_device_read,
.prog = user_provided_block_device_prog,
.erase = user_provided_block_device_erase,
.sync = user_provided_block_device_sync,
// block device configuration
.read_size = 16,
.prog_size = 16,
.block_size = 4096,
.block_count = 128,
.cache_size = 16,
.lookahead_size = 16,
.block_cycles = 500,
};
// entry point
int main(void) {
// mount the filesystem
int err = lfs_mount(&lfs, &cfg);
// reformat if we can't mount the filesystem
// this should only happen on the first boot
if (err) {
lfs_format(&lfs, &cfg);
lfs_mount(&lfs, &cfg);
}
// read current count
uint32_t boot_count = 0;
lfs_file_open(&lfs, &file, "boot_count", LFS_O_RDWR | LFS_O_CREAT);
lfs_file_read(&lfs, &file, &boot_count, sizeof(boot_count));
// update boot count
boot_count += 1;
lfs_file_rewind(&lfs, &file);
lfs_file_write(&lfs, &file, &boot_count, sizeof(boot_count));
// remember the storage is not updated until the file is closed successfully
lfs_file_close(&lfs, &file);
// release any resources we were using
lfs_unmount(&lfs);
// print the boot count
printf("boot_count: %d\n", boot_count);
}
Usage
Detailed documentation (or at least as much detail as is currently available) can be found in the comments in lfs.h.
littlefs takes in a configuration structure that defines how the filesystem operates. The configuration struct provides the filesystem with the block device operations and dimensions, tweakable parameters that tradeoff memory usage for performance, and optional static buffers if the user wants to avoid dynamic memory.
The state of the littlefs is stored in the lfs_t type which is left up
to the user to allocate, allowing multiple filesystems to be in use
simultaneously. With the lfs_t and configuration struct, a user can
format a block device or mount the filesystem.
Once mounted, the littlefs provides a full set of POSIX-like file and directory functions, with the deviation that the allocation of filesystem structures must be provided by the user.
All POSIX operations, such as remove and rename, are atomic, even in event of power-loss. Additionally, file updates are not actually committed to the filesystem until sync or close is called on the file.
Other notes
All littlefs calls have the potential to return a negative error code. The
errors can be either one of those found in the enum lfs_error in
lfs.h, or an error returned by the user's block device operations.
In the configuration struct, the prog and erase function provided by the
user may return a LFS_ERR_CORRUPT error if the implementation already can
detect corrupt blocks. However, the wear leveling does not depend on the return
code of these functions, instead all data is read back and checked for
integrity.
If your storage caches writes, make sure that the provided sync function
flushes all the data to memory and ensures that the next read fetches the data
from memory, otherwise data integrity can not be guaranteed. If the write
function does not perform caching, and therefore each read or write call
hits the memory, the sync function can simply return 0.
Design
At a high level, littlefs is a block based filesystem that uses small logs to store metadata and larger copy-on-write (COW) structures to store file data.
In littlefs, these ingredients form a sort of two-layered cake, with the small logs (called metadata pairs) providing fast updates to metadata anywhere on storage, while the COW structures store file data compactly and without any wear amplification cost.
Both of these data structures are built out of blocks, which are fed by a common block allocator. By limiting the number of erases allowed on a block per allocation, the allocator provides dynamic wear leveling over the entire filesystem.
root
.--------.--------.
| A'| B'| |
| | |-> |
| | | |
'--------'--------'
.----' '--------------.
A v B v
.--------.--------. .--------.--------.
| C'| D'| | | E'|new| |
| | |-> | | | E'|-> |
| | | | | | | |
'--------'--------' '--------'--------'
.-' '--. | '------------------.
v v .-' v
.--------. .--------. v .--------.
| C | | D | .--------. write | new E |
| | | | | E | ==> | |
| | | | | | | |
'--------' '--------' | | '--------'
'--------' .-' |
.-' '-. .-------------|------'
v v v v
.--------. .--------. .--------.
| F | | G | | new F |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
'--------' '--------' '--------'
More details on how littlefs works can be found in DESIGN.md and SPEC.md.
-
DESIGN.md - A fully detailed dive into how littlefs works. I would suggest reading it as the tradeoffs at work are quite interesting.
-
SPEC.md - The on-disk specification of littlefs with all the nitty-gritty details. May be useful for tooling development.
Testing
The littlefs comes with a test suite designed to run on a PC using the emulated block device found in the emubd directory. The tests assume a Linux environment and can be started with make:
make test
License
The littlefs is provided under the BSD-3-Clause license. See LICENSE.md for more information. Contributions to this project are accepted under the same license.
Individual files contain the following tag instead of the full license text.
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
This enables machine processing of license information based on the SPDX License Identifiers that are here available: http://spdx.org/licenses/
Related projects
-
littlefs-fuse - A FUSE wrapper for littlefs. The project allows you to mount littlefs directly on a Linux machine. Can be useful for debugging littlefs if you have an SD card handy.
-
littlefs-js - A javascript wrapper for littlefs. I'm not sure why you would want this, but it is handy for demos. You can see it in action here.
-
mklfs - A command line tool built by the Lua RTOS guys for making littlefs images from a host PC. Supports Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
-
Mbed OS - The easiest way to get started with littlefs is to jump into Mbed which already has block device drivers for most forms of embedded storage. littlefs is available in Mbed OS as the LittleFileSystem class.
-
SPIFFS - Another excellent embedded filesystem for NOR flash. As a more traditional logging filesystem with full static wear-leveling, SPIFFS will likely outperform littlefs on small memories such as the internal flash on microcontrollers.
-
Dhara - An interesting NAND flash translation layer designed for small MCUs. It offers static wear-leveling and power-resilience with only a fixed O(|address|) pointer structure stored on each block and in RAM.