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1================================================================================
2WHAT IS Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS)?
3================================================================================
4
5NAND flash memory-based storage devices, such as SSD, eMMC, and SD cards, have
6been equipped on a variety systems ranging from mobile to server systems. Since
7they are known to have different characteristics from the conventional rotating
8disks, a file system, an upper layer to the storage device, should adapt to the
9changes from the sketch in the design level.
10
11F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which
12is based on Log-structured File System (LFS). The design has been focused on
13addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering
14tree and high cleaning overhead.
15
16Since a NAND flash memory-based storage device shows different characteristic
17according to its internal geometry or flash memory management scheme, namely FTL,
18F2FS and its tools support various parameters not only for configuring on-disk
19layout, but also for selecting allocation and cleaning algorithms.
20
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21The following git tree provides the file system formatting tool (mkfs.f2fs),
22a consistency checking tool (fsck.f2fs), and a debugging tool (dump.f2fs).
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23>> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jaegeuk/f2fs-tools.git
24
25For reporting bugs and sending patches, please use the following mailing list:
26>> linux-f2fs-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
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27
28================================================================================
29BACKGROUND AND DESIGN ISSUES
30================================================================================
31
32Log-structured File System (LFS)
33--------------------------------
34"A log-structured file system writes all modifications to disk sequentially in
35a log-like structure, thereby speeding up both file writing and crash recovery.
36The log is the only structure on disk; it contains indexing information so that
37files can be read back from the log efficiently. In order to maintain large free
38areas on disk for fast writing, we divide the log into segments and use a
39segment cleaner to compress the live information from heavily fragmented
40segments." from Rosenblum, M. and Ousterhout, J. K., 1992, "The design and
41implementation of a log-structured file system", ACM Trans. Computer Systems
4210, 1, 26–52.
43
44Wandering Tree Problem
45----------------------
46In LFS, when a file data is updated and written to the end of log, its direct
47pointer block is updated due to the changed location. Then the indirect pointer
48block is also updated due to the direct pointer block update. In this manner,
49the upper index structures such as inode, inode map, and checkpoint block are
50also updated recursively. This problem is called as wandering tree problem [1],
51and in order to enhance the performance, it should eliminate or relax the update
52propagation as much as possible.
53
54[1] Bityutskiy, A. 2005. JFFS3 design issues. http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/
55
56Cleaning Overhead
57-----------------
58Since LFS is based on out-of-place writes, it produces so many obsolete blocks
59scattered across the whole storage. In order to serve new empty log space, it
60needs to reclaim these obsolete blocks seamlessly to users. This job is called
61as a cleaning process.
62
63The process consists of three operations as follows.
641. A victim segment is selected through referencing segment usage table.
652. It loads parent index structures of all the data in the victim identified by
66 segment summary blocks.
673. It checks the cross-reference between the data and its parent index structure.
684. It moves valid data selectively.
69
70This cleaning job may cause unexpected long delays, so the most important goal
71is to hide the latencies to users. And also definitely, it should reduce the
72amount of valid data to be moved, and move them quickly as well.
73
74================================================================================
75KEY FEATURES
76================================================================================
77
78Flash Awareness
79---------------
80- Enlarge the random write area for better performance, but provide the high
81 spatial locality
82- Align FS data structures to the operational units in FTL as best efforts
83
84Wandering Tree Problem
85----------------------
86- Use a term, “node”, that represents inodes as well as various pointer blocks
87- Introduce Node Address Table (NAT) containing the locations of all the “node”
88 blocks; this will cut off the update propagation.
89
90Cleaning Overhead
91-----------------
92- Support a background cleaning process
93- Support greedy and cost-benefit algorithms for victim selection policies
94- Support multi-head logs for static/dynamic hot and cold data separation
95- Introduce adaptive logging for efficient block allocation
96
97================================================================================
98MOUNT OPTIONS
99================================================================================
100
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101background_gc=%s Turn on/off cleaning operations, namely garbage
102 collection, triggered in background when I/O subsystem is
103 idle. If background_gc=on, it will turn on the garbage
104 collection and if background_gc=off, garbage collection
4bb9998d 105 will be turned off. If background_gc=sync, it will turn
6aefd93b 106 on synchronous garbage collection running in background.
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107 Default value for this option is on. So garbage
108 collection is on by default.
98e4da8c 109disable_roll_forward Disable the roll-forward recovery routine
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110norecovery Disable the roll-forward recovery routine, mounted read-
111 only (i.e., -o ro,disable_roll_forward)
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112discard/nodiscard Enable/disable real-time discard in f2fs, if discard is
113 enabled, f2fs will issue discard/TRIM commands when a
114 segment is cleaned.
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115no_heap Disable heap-style segment allocation which finds free
116 segments for data from the beginning of main area, while
117 for node from the end of main area.
118nouser_xattr Disable Extended User Attributes. Note: xattr is enabled
119 by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_XATTR is selected.
120noacl Disable POSIX Access Control List. Note: acl is enabled
121 by default if CONFIG_F2FS_FS_POSIX_ACL is selected.
122active_logs=%u Support configuring the number of active logs. In the
123 current design, f2fs supports only 2, 4, and 6 logs.
124 Default number is 6.
125disable_ext_identify Disable the extension list configured by mkfs, so f2fs
126 does not aware of cold files such as media files.
66e960c6 127inline_xattr Enable the inline xattrs feature.
23cf7212 128noinline_xattr Disable the inline xattrs feature.
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129inline_data Enable the inline data feature: New created small(<~3.4k)
130 files can be written into inode block.
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131inline_dentry Enable the inline dir feature: data in new created
132 directory entries can be written into inode block. The
133 space of inode block which is used to store inline
134 dentries is limited to ~3.4k.
04b9a5f0 135noinline_dentry Disable the inline dentry feature.
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136flush_merge Merge concurrent cache_flush commands as much as possible
137 to eliminate redundant command issues. If the underlying
138 device handles the cache_flush command relatively slowly,
139 recommend to enable this option.
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140nobarrier This option can be used if underlying storage guarantees
141 its cached data should be written to the novolatile area.
142 If this option is set, no cache_flush commands are issued
143 but f2fs still guarantees the write ordering of all the
144 data writes.
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145fastboot This option is used when a system wants to reduce mount
146 time as much as possible, even though normal performance
147 can be sacrificed.
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148extent_cache Enable an extent cache based on rb-tree, it can cache
149 as many as extent which map between contiguous logical
150 address and physical address per inode, resulting in
7daaea25 151 increasing the cache hit ratio. Set by default.
4bb9998d 152noextent_cache Disable an extent cache based on rb-tree explicitly, see
7daaea25 153 the above extent_cache mount option.
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154noinline_data Disable the inline data feature, inline data feature is
155 enabled by default.
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156data_flush Enable data flushing before checkpoint in order to
157 persist data of regular and symlink.
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158mode=%s Control block allocation mode which supports "adaptive"
159 and "lfs". In "lfs" mode, there should be no random
160 writes towards main area.
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161io_bits=%u Set the bit size of write IO requests. It should be set
162 with "mode=lfs".
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163
164================================================================================
165DEBUGFS ENTRIES
166================================================================================
167
168/sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/ contains information about all the partitions mounted as
169f2fs. Each file shows the whole f2fs information.
170
171/sys/kernel/debug/f2fs/status includes:
172 - major file system information managed by f2fs currently
173 - average SIT information about whole segments
174 - current memory footprint consumed by f2fs.
175
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176================================================================================
177SYSFS ENTRIES
178================================================================================
179
6de3f12e 180Information about mounted f2fs file systems can be found in
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181/sys/fs/f2fs. Each mounted filesystem will have a directory in
182/sys/fs/f2fs based on its device name (i.e., /sys/fs/f2fs/sda).
183The files in each per-device directory are shown in table below.
184
185Files in /sys/fs/f2fs/<devname>
186(see also Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-fs-f2fs)
187..............................................................................
188 File Content
189
190 gc_max_sleep_time This tuning parameter controls the maximum sleep
191 time for the garbage collection thread. Time is
192 in milliseconds.
193
194 gc_min_sleep_time This tuning parameter controls the minimum sleep
195 time for the garbage collection thread. Time is
196 in milliseconds.
197
198 gc_no_gc_sleep_time This tuning parameter controls the default sleep
199 time for the garbage collection thread. Time is
200 in milliseconds.
201
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202 gc_idle This parameter controls the selection of victim
203 policy for garbage collection. Setting gc_idle = 0
204 (default) will disable this option. Setting
205 gc_idle = 1 will select the Cost Benefit approach
4bb9998d 206 & setting gc_idle = 2 will select the greedy approach.
d2dc095f 207
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208 reclaim_segments This parameter controls the number of prefree
209 segments to be reclaimed. If the number of prefree
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210 segments is larger than the number of segments
211 in the proportion to the percentage over total
212 volume size, f2fs tries to conduct checkpoint to
213 reclaim the prefree segments to free segments.
214 By default, 5% over total # of segments.
ea91e9b0 215
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216 max_small_discards This parameter controls the number of discard
217 commands that consist small blocks less than 2MB.
218 The candidates to be discarded are cached until
219 checkpoint is triggered, and issued during the
220 checkpoint. By default, it is disabled with 0.
221
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222 trim_sections This parameter controls the number of sections
223 to be trimmed out in batch mode when FITRIM
224 conducts. 32 sections is set by default.
225
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226 ipu_policy This parameter controls the policy of in-place
227 updates in f2fs. There are five policies:
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228 0x01: F2FS_IPU_FORCE, 0x02: F2FS_IPU_SSR,
229 0x04: F2FS_IPU_UTIL, 0x08: F2FS_IPU_SSR_UTIL,
230 0x10: F2FS_IPU_FSYNC.
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231
232 min_ipu_util This parameter controls the threshold to trigger
233 in-place-updates. The number indicates percentage
234 of the filesystem utilization, and used by
235 F2FS_IPU_UTIL and F2FS_IPU_SSR_UTIL policies.
236
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237 min_fsync_blocks This parameter controls the threshold to trigger
238 in-place-updates when F2FS_IPU_FSYNC mode is set.
239 The number indicates the number of dirty pages
240 when fsync needs to flush on its call path. If
241 the number is less than this value, it triggers
242 in-place-updates.
243
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244 max_victim_search This parameter controls the number of trials to
245 find a victim segment when conducting SSR and
246 cleaning operations. The default value is 4096
247 which covers 8GB block address range.
248
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249 dir_level This parameter controls the directory level to
250 support large directory. If a directory has a
251 number of files, it can reduce the file lookup
252 latency by increasing this dir_level value.
253 Otherwise, it needs to decrease this value to
254 reduce the space overhead. The default value is 0.
255
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256 ram_thresh This parameter controls the memory footprint used
257 by free nids and cached nat entries. By default,
258 10 is set, which indicates 10 MB / 1 GB RAM.
259
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260================================================================================
261USAGE
262================================================================================
263
2641. Download userland tools and compile them.
265
2662. Skip, if f2fs was compiled statically inside kernel.
267 Otherwise, insert the f2fs.ko module.
268 # insmod f2fs.ko
269
2703. Create a directory trying to mount
271 # mkdir /mnt/f2fs
272
2734. Format the block device, and then mount as f2fs
274 # mkfs.f2fs -l label /dev/block_device
275 # mount -t f2fs /dev/block_device /mnt/f2fs
276
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277mkfs.f2fs
278---------
279The mkfs.f2fs is for the use of formatting a partition as the f2fs filesystem,
280which builds a basic on-disk layout.
281
282The options consist of:
1571f84a 283-l [label] : Give a volume label, up to 512 unicode name.
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284-a [0 or 1] : Split start location of each area for heap-based allocation.
285 1 is set by default, which performs this.
286-o [int] : Set overprovision ratio in percent over volume size.
287 5 is set by default.
288-s [int] : Set the number of segments per section.
289 1 is set by default.
290-z [int] : Set the number of sections per zone.
291 1 is set by default.
292-e [str] : Set basic extension list. e.g. "mp3,gif,mov"
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293-t [0 or 1] : Disable discard command or not.
294 1 is set by default, which conducts discard.
98e4da8c 295
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296fsck.f2fs
297---------
298The fsck.f2fs is a tool to check the consistency of an f2fs-formatted
299partition, which examines whether the filesystem metadata and user-made data
300are cross-referenced correctly or not.
301Note that, initial version of the tool does not fix any inconsistency.
302
303The options consist of:
304 -d debug level [default:0]
305
306dump.f2fs
307---------
308The dump.f2fs shows the information of specific inode and dumps SSA and SIT to
309file. Each file is dump_ssa and dump_sit.
310
311The dump.f2fs is used to debug on-disk data structures of the f2fs filesystem.
4bb9998d 312It shows on-disk inode information recognized by a given inode number, and is
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313able to dump all the SSA and SIT entries into predefined files, ./dump_ssa and
314./dump_sit respectively.
315
316The options consist of:
317 -d debug level [default:0]
318 -i inode no (hex)
319 -s [SIT dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
320 -a [SSA dump segno from #1~#2 (decimal), for all 0~-1]
321
322Examples:
323# dump.f2fs -i [ino] /dev/sdx
324# dump.f2fs -s 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SIT dump)
325# dump.f2fs -a 0~-1 /dev/sdx (SSA dump)
326
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327================================================================================
328DESIGN
329================================================================================
330
331On-disk Layout
332--------------
333
334F2FS divides the whole volume into a number of segments, each of which is fixed
335to 2MB in size. A section is composed of consecutive segments, and a zone
336consists of a set of sections. By default, section and zone sizes are set to one
337segment size identically, but users can easily modify the sizes by mkfs.
338
339F2FS splits the entire volume into six areas, and all the areas except superblock
340consists of multiple segments as described below.
341
342 align with the zone size <-|
343 |-> align with the segment size
344 _________________________________________________________________________
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345 | | | Segment | Node | Segment | |
346 | Superblock | Checkpoint | Info. | Address | Summary | Main |
347 | (SB) | (CP) | Table (SIT) | Table (NAT) | Area (SSA) | |
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348 |____________|_____2______|______N______|______N______|______N_____|__N___|
349 . .
350 . .
351 . .
352 ._________________________________________.
353 |_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|_..._|_Segment_|
354 . .
355 ._________._________
356 |_section_|__...__|_
357 . .
358 .________.
359 |__zone__|
360
361- Superblock (SB)
362 : It is located at the beginning of the partition, and there exist two copies
363 to avoid file system crash. It contains basic partition information and some
364 default parameters of f2fs.
365
366- Checkpoint (CP)
367 : It contains file system information, bitmaps for valid NAT/SIT sets, orphan
368 inode lists, and summary entries of current active segments.
369
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370- Segment Information Table (SIT)
371 : It contains segment information such as valid block count and bitmap for the
372 validity of all the blocks.
373
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374- Node Address Table (NAT)
375 : It is composed of a block address table for all the node blocks stored in
376 Main area.
377
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378- Segment Summary Area (SSA)
379 : It contains summary entries which contains the owner information of all the
380 data and node blocks stored in Main area.
381
382- Main Area
383 : It contains file and directory data including their indices.
384
385In order to avoid misalignment between file system and flash-based storage, F2FS
386aligns the start block address of CP with the segment size. Also, it aligns the
387start block address of Main area with the zone size by reserving some segments
388in SSA area.
389
390Reference the following survey for additional technical details.
391https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/Kernel/Projects/FlashCardSurvey
392
393File System Metadata Structure
394------------------------------
395
396F2FS adopts the checkpointing scheme to maintain file system consistency. At
397mount time, F2FS first tries to find the last valid checkpoint data by scanning
398CP area. In order to reduce the scanning time, F2FS uses only two copies of CP.
399One of them always indicates the last valid data, which is called as shadow copy
400mechanism. In addition to CP, NAT and SIT also adopt the shadow copy mechanism.
401
402For file system consistency, each CP points to which NAT and SIT copies are
403valid, as shown as below.
404
405 +--------+----------+---------+
9268cc35 406 | CP | SIT | NAT |
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407 +--------+----------+---------+
408 . . . .
409 . . . .
410 . . . .
411 +-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
9268cc35 412 | CP #0 | CP #1 | SIT #0 | SIT #1 | NAT #0 | NAT #1 |
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413 +-------+-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
414 | ^ ^
415 | | |
416 `----------------------------------------'
417
418Index Structure
419---------------
420
421The key data structure to manage the data locations is a "node". Similar to
422traditional file structures, F2FS has three types of node: inode, direct node,
d08ab08d 423indirect node. F2FS assigns 4KB to an inode block which contains 923 data block
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424indices, two direct node pointers, two indirect node pointers, and one double
425indirect node pointer as described below. One direct node block contains 1018
426data blocks, and one indirect node block contains also 1018 node blocks. Thus,
427one inode block (i.e., a file) covers:
428
429 4KB * (923 + 2 * 1018 + 2 * 1018 * 1018 + 1018 * 1018 * 1018) := 3.94TB.
430
431 Inode block (4KB)
432 |- data (923)
433 |- direct node (2)
434 | `- data (1018)
435 |- indirect node (2)
436 | `- direct node (1018)
437 | `- data (1018)
438 `- double indirect node (1)
439 `- indirect node (1018)
440 `- direct node (1018)
441 `- data (1018)
442
443Note that, all the node blocks are mapped by NAT which means the location of
444each node is translated by the NAT table. In the consideration of the wandering
445tree problem, F2FS is able to cut off the propagation of node updates caused by
446leaf data writes.
447
448Directory Structure
449-------------------
450
451A directory entry occupies 11 bytes, which consists of the following attributes.
452
453- hash hash value of the file name
454- ino inode number
455- len the length of file name
456- type file type such as directory, symlink, etc
457
458A dentry block consists of 214 dentry slots and file names. Therein a bitmap is
459used to represent whether each dentry is valid or not. A dentry block occupies
4604KB with the following composition.
461
462 Dentry Block(4 K) = bitmap (27 bytes) + reserved (3 bytes) +
463 dentries(11 * 214 bytes) + file name (8 * 214 bytes)
464
465 [Bucket]
466 +--------------------------------+
467 |dentry block 1 | dentry block 2 |
468 +--------------------------------+
469 . .
470 . .
471 . [Dentry Block Structure: 4KB] .
472 +--------+----------+----------+------------+
473 | bitmap | reserved | dentries | file names |
474 +--------+----------+----------+------------+
475 [Dentry Block: 4KB] . .
476 . .
477 . .
478 +------+------+-----+------+
479 | hash | ino | len | type |
480 +------+------+-----+------+
481 [Dentry Structure: 11 bytes]
482
483F2FS implements multi-level hash tables for directory structure. Each level has
484a hash table with dedicated number of hash buckets as shown below. Note that
485"A(2B)" means a bucket includes 2 data blocks.
486
487----------------------
488A : bucket
489B : block
490N : MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH
491----------------------
492
493level #0 | A(2B)
494 |
495level #1 | A(2B) - A(2B)
496 |
497level #2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B)
498 . | . . . .
499level #N/2 | A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - A(2B) - ... - A(2B)
500 . | . . . .
501level #N | A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - A(4B) - ... - A(4B)
502
503The number of blocks and buckets are determined by,
504
505 ,- 2, if n < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
506 # of blocks in level #n = |
507 `- 4, Otherwise
508
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509 ,- 2^(n + dir_level),
510 | if n + dir_level < MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2,
98e4da8c 511 # of buckets in level #n = |
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512 `- 2^((MAX_DIR_HASH_DEPTH / 2) - 1),
513 Otherwise
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514
515When F2FS finds a file name in a directory, at first a hash value of the file
516name is calculated. Then, F2FS scans the hash table in level #0 to find the
517dentry consisting of the file name and its inode number. If not found, F2FS
518scans the next hash table in level #1. In this way, F2FS scans hash tables in
519each levels incrementally from 1 to N. In each levels F2FS needs to scan only
520one bucket determined by the following equation, which shows O(log(# of files))
521complexity.
522
523 bucket number to scan in level #n = (hash value) % (# of buckets in level #n)
524
525In the case of file creation, F2FS finds empty consecutive slots that cover the
526file name. F2FS searches the empty slots in the hash tables of whole levels from
5271 to N in the same way as the lookup operation.
528
529The following figure shows an example of two cases holding children.
530 --------------> Dir <--------------
531 | |
532 child child
533
534 child - child [hole] - child
535
536 child - child - child [hole] - [hole] - child
537
538 Case 1: Case 2:
539 Number of children = 6, Number of children = 3,
540 File size = 7 File size = 7
541
542Default Block Allocation
543------------------------
544
545At runtime, F2FS manages six active logs inside "Main" area: Hot/Warm/Cold node
546and Hot/Warm/Cold data.
547
548- Hot node contains direct node blocks of directories.
549- Warm node contains direct node blocks except hot node blocks.
550- Cold node contains indirect node blocks
551- Hot data contains dentry blocks
552- Warm data contains data blocks except hot and cold data blocks
553- Cold data contains multimedia data or migrated data blocks
554
555LFS has two schemes for free space management: threaded log and copy-and-compac-
556tion. The copy-and-compaction scheme which is known as cleaning, is well-suited
557for devices showing very good sequential write performance, since free segments
558are served all the time for writing new data. However, it suffers from cleaning
559overhead under high utilization. Contrarily, the threaded log scheme suffers
560from random writes, but no cleaning process is needed. F2FS adopts a hybrid
561scheme where the copy-and-compaction scheme is adopted by default, but the
562policy is dynamically changed to the threaded log scheme according to the file
563system status.
564
565In order to align F2FS with underlying flash-based storage, F2FS allocates a
566segment in a unit of section. F2FS expects that the section size would be the
567same as the unit size of garbage collection in FTL. Furthermore, with respect
568to the mapping granularity in FTL, F2FS allocates each section of the active
569logs from different zones as much as possible, since FTL can write the data in
570the active logs into one allocation unit according to its mapping granularity.
571
572Cleaning process
573----------------
574
575F2FS does cleaning both on demand and in the background. On-demand cleaning is
576triggered when there are not enough free segments to serve VFS calls. Background
577cleaner is operated by a kernel thread, and triggers the cleaning job when the
578system is idle.
579
580F2FS supports two victim selection policies: greedy and cost-benefit algorithms.
581In the greedy algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment having the smallest number
582of valid blocks. In the cost-benefit algorithm, F2FS selects a victim segment
583according to the segment age and the number of valid blocks in order to address
584log block thrashing problem in the greedy algorithm. F2FS adopts the greedy
585algorithm for on-demand cleaner, while background cleaner adopts cost-benefit
586algorithm.
587
588In order to identify whether the data in the victim segment are valid or not,
589F2FS manages a bitmap. Each bit represents the validity of a block, and the
590bitmap is composed of a bit stream covering whole blocks in main area.