I am afraid the root filesystem is a kind of journaling filesystem, and it could become too saturated if we keep reinstalling things again. Can anybody tell us if it does recover space from deleted files, or if it does saturate up to the point a reflash is needed?

Of course one can install in the cards, and I think it is the best solution. Problem here, is that most cards are mounted vfat. Has anybody formatted ext2 CF disks or SD cards?

You are afraid of journaling file systems? Why?

Journalling just means changes are written first to a journal and then the changes are made to the filesystem and when those changes complete the journal entry is retired.

It would be a very silly JFS that didn't retire the journal entries.

If you were concerned about using the filesystem because you're afraid the author may have killed his wife... that might have a basis in reality.

Well, I agree that it is unlikely to forget to delete journal entries.

It is just that I am not yet sure about the drivers here. They just mount as ext2

/dev/tffsa2 on / type ext2 (rw,noatime)

and I am not sure how the "tffs: TrueFFS driver 632.70" works. Does it journals, or straight write?

tffs: TrueFFS driver 632.70" works. Does it journals, or straight write?

Uggh. It seems it straightly writes. But it is sort of obscure, it was a thingie called DOC (by Disk-On-Chip) by the company M-Systems, now a SanDisk subsidiary (SanDisk to Acquire msystems, July 2006 (http://www.msystems.com/site/en-US/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/2006/NR060730.htm )). There is a driver for this beast, but TrueFFS is the private, binary, driver. Thus it joins to the USB driver in the collection of things that must be sorted out in order to open the source code :angry:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45138438@N00/223905081/in/photostream/ is a nice photo of the chip, from Snoopy68, and this is the corresponding page in M-Systems: http://www.msystems.com/site/en-US/Products/DiskOnChip/DiskOnChip/Products/mDiskOnChip_G3.htm

Basically TrueFFS is a dinamic+static wear leveling, to optimise the limit of 10K-100K rewritings. No bad.

arivero, what exactly are you looking for? Ways to reflash the DOC? I've found a couple of interesting looking shell scripts in the filesystem (http://iliad.mobileread.com/os/) that seem to do just this.

TadW, I was wondering now if we need to reflash it or not. It seems that the answer is in the negative, from the doc I was reading. I was afraid that many rewrites of a single file could damage the flashdisk, or somethinf so.