Costa Mesa, California, November 2, 2011 — Micro Digital, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of smxFFS™ v2. It has been completely redesigned to use very little RAM, yet support very large flash devices, up to 256TB. It is suitable for small SoCs with only on-chip memories. Its RAM footprint is only 2KB, plus 2KB per open file (for 512 byte sector or page size), and does not depend on flash size. Its ROM requirement is also small, only 20KB for the whole API. The design has a few reasonable limitations to achieve this small footprint. Additional RAM and ROM are needed for the flash drivers; see the note below.
smxFFS v2 supports NAND and NOR flash. It can share flash with smxFS, smxFLog, boot code, and application code. The API is the standard C library API (fopen(), fread(), etc.), extended with functions to support long file names, subdirectories, and other services. The new API and other characteristics make it more consistent with smxFS, our FAT file system, than v1. Although integrated with the SMX® RTOS, smxFFS can be ported to other RTOSes or run standalone.
smxFFS v2 is power fail safe. Unlike a FAT file system, there is no FAT area, so if power fails during a file operation, only those files that are not closed may lose data. Other files and the file system itself will not be damaged. Wear leveling, garbage collection, error correction, etc. are done by the smxNAND and smxNOR drivers.
For more information, visit www.smxrtos.com/rtos/fileio/smxffs.htm.
Note: smxFFS size does not depend on flash size but does depend on sector or page size. For a 2KB sector or page size, RAM required is 8KB + 2KB per file. Also, additional RAM and ROM are needed for the flash drivers. smxNAND: 13KB RAM for 256MB flash, 14KB ROM. smxNOR: 1.5KB RAM, 5KB ROM. RAM size for smxNAND increases with flash size; see the smxNAND User’s Guide for details.
smxFFS v2 is available now and includes full source code, 90 days of technical support, and no per-seat charges. All of Micro Digital’s software is royalty-free and sold with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Demos are available, at no charge, for qualified evaluators from www.smxrtos.com/demo.
About Micro Digital
Micro Digital, Inc. has been in the embedded systems business for over 35 years and has been producing and selling embedded software products for over 20 years. Micro Digital is dedicated to providing quality products and support for embedded systems at moderate prices. We may be contacted at 1-800-366-2491 or sales@smxrtos.com
