Re: [PLUG] Filesystem recommendations for very small flash partitions.

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 9:12 PM, Philip Rushik <prushik@gmail.com> wrote:
> So I made a little (100mb) partition at the end of the SD card, that will
> contain a file contain some simple data about what music is currently
> playing, and what the current playlist looks like. but I'm wondering what
> file system would be good for something like that, or do I even want a
> filesystem (maybe I can just read and write to /dev/mmcblk0p3). I'm looking
> for something that is good for very small file systems, can get mounted and
> unmounted quickly and often, and rewritten often. I want to prioritize speed
> and reducing IO over data integrity, since if it gets corrupted I will just
> reformat that partition.

100mb is really just a normal-sized filesystem.  You don't REALLY need
to do anything special to accomodate it.  If you were trying to create
a 64kb filesystem then, sure, I'd be really concerned about picking
something where the superblocks don't eat up all your space.

So, the most conservative solution would be to stick with ext4.

However, on flash in general (especially if you don't mind something
experimental) F2FS should have some benefits in terms of wear leveling
and trim performance (you're overwriting in place otherwise, which is
probably worst-case for flash).  However, we're still talking about a
tiny file on a filesystem that is 99.99% free space, so I can't
imagine that trim will slow things down all that much.

F2FS is another one of those topics that is probably worth a talk.
Main downside is that you don't have all the benefits of ZFS/btrfs.
However, it is a really sound design for an SSD since it is tailored
to the strengths/weaknesses of the hardware.

-- 
Rich
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