Real-time support of flash memory file system for embedded applications

NAND flash memory has emerged as an attractive proposition for embedded storage applications due to its properties of robustness, low price, a high number of write-erase cycles, and large capacities. To make it suitable for real-time embedded applications, this paper presents the design of a log structured file system that utilizes data redundancy and parallel operations to guarantee bounded read-write access latencies to real-time tasks, in the presence of requests from non real-time tasks. The proposed scheme requires minimal support from the underlying operating system. In addition, the paper proposes a storage scheme to reduce RAM footprint for the log structured file system while preserving reliability and minimal read/write overhead.