[CUWiN-Dev] Flash Compression

[Quantum Scientific]

On Monday 14 March 2005 12:53, David Young wrote:
> CompactFlash cards do their own wear-leveling, so JFFS is not needed.

I don't think so, as most are NOR.  Wear levelling isn't so important though 
when your system runs in ramdisk I suppose.

But I believe you are using the flash as a block device (emulated), which 
means you probably have two journalling file systems on top of one another 
(depending on the drivers): one is the flash translation layer, and the other 
is UFS-44bsd.  JFFS would be one journalling filesystem, and it has 
compression as well.
http://sourceware.org/jffs2/jffs2-html/node1.html
Just a suggestion.  I do not know whether it would be bootable with just one 
partition.

Another option to save space on flash, is compression of directory structures 
into files on flash, with dynamic decompression on boot to ramdisk -- CIFS.  
This is bootable with just one part.

If the system image could be reduced below 16MB, no hardware modification to 
the Belkin or other router would be needed, to do remote updates.  I was 
surprised to find the image is only 22.5MB now, so it may compress to 12MB.

Carl Cook