Huawei Announces EROFS Linux File-System, Might Eventually Be Used By Android Devices
EROFS is the company's new approach for a read-only file-system that would work well for Android devices. EROFS is short for the Extendable Read-Only File-System and they began developing it with being unsatisfied with other read-only file-system alternatives.
EROFS is designed to offer better performance than other read-only alternatives while still focusing upon saving storage space. As part of EROFS is also a compression mode pursuing a different design approach than other file-systems: the compression numbers shared in today's announcement on both server hardware and a Kirin 970 are compelling for being in the early stages of development.
EROFS is still very much a work-in-progress and the on-disk layout format has yet to be finalized. It will likely take several months at a minimum before Huawei potentially seeks the inclusion of the code into the mainline Linux kernel.
Don't look for EROFS appearing on Android devices in the immediate future, it's still in the very early stages of development.
The user-space bits for making a EROFS file-system will be published once they clear their internal review, but for now the initial five thousand lines of kernel code making up this read-only file-system driver can be found for review and discussion on the kernel mailing list.
11 Comments
