[Yaffs-archive] YAFFS - News

[Charles Manning]

Hi YAFFSers

I was hoping to check in the latest stuff before the end of 2002, but I 
decided to take a bit of a break over Christmas/New Year to be a more 
effective family member.

The good news is that the stuff Luc and I have been working on looks robust, 
is faster, and fixes a few quirky things that were not right. I expect this 
will be checked in within a week.

I think it is satisfying to look back and reflect on what has been achieved 
in YAFFS-land in less than a year (first line of YAFFS code was written on 12 
Jan 2002).  YAFFS has provided a NAND filesystem solution that has pulled 
more than one project out of the soup. Already YAFFS is in daily use on many 
thousand devices,  totalling over a terabyte of NAND.

Being an open source project has helped drive YAFFS faster and harder than 
closed code. Different people have stressed  YAFFS from different angles 
which has helped improve performance and robustness and driven YAFFS beyond 
"works OK most of the time". For example:
* Luc has been using YAFFS on a low-power CPU. This has stressed the 
performance aspects.
* A WinCE product uses YAFFS with 512MB NAND arrays. This stressed the 
handling of large arrays.
* WinCE4 people discovered the need for improved name handling.
The benefits of fixing these flow through to all users.

Everyone that has supported, touched or uses YAFFS is helping to 
improve it, but I'd like to acknowledge some particular contributions:
* Toby Churchill and Brightstar for funding the early part of YAFFS 
development. Believing in something that does not exist is critical to 
supporting and encouraging innovation. Thanks for having faith in YAFFS.
* Nick Bane. Thanks Nick for putting up with some of the earlier code 
releases, bug hunting and various fixes. Thanks for extensive testing. Thanks 
for admin on the yaffs list.
* Luc van OostenRyck: Thanks Luc for the efforts you have put into fixing VFS 
issues and others. Thanks for extensive testing and driving performance.
* Tomas Gleixner (NAND mtd maintainer): Thanks Thomas for the NAND mtd 
efforts that make YAFFS possible. Thanks for the YAFFS specific mtd 
optimisations that help make YAFFS run faster under Linux.
* David Woodhouse (JFFS2 maintainer): Thanks David for various discussions 
that helped to form the YAFFS arrchitecture. Thanks too for JFFS2 which was 
used as a blueprint for some vfs layer code.
* Wookey: Thanks Wookey for the support in starting YAFFS, for providing 
YAFFS with a home.

Thanks to everyone out there working with, or using, YAFFS.

-- Charles



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