UBIFS

The Unsorted Block Image File System (UBIFS) is a successor to JFFS2, and competitor to LogFS, as a file system for use with raw flash memory media. Development began in earnest in 2007, with the first stable release made to Linux kernel 2.6.27 in October 2008. The file system is developed by Nokia engineers with help of the University of Szeged, Hungary.

Note that UBIFS works on top of an unsorted block images device, which is itself on top of a memory technology device (MTD). MTDs are not to be used directly. Two major differences between UBIFS and JFFS2 are that UBIFS supports write caching, and UBIFS errs on the pessimistic side of free space calculation. UBIFS tends to perform better than JFFS2 for large NAND FLASH devices. This is a consequence of the UBIFS design goals: faster mounting, quicker access to large files, and improved write speeds. UBIFS also preserves or improves upon JFFS2's on-the-fly compression, recoverability and power fail tolerance. UBIFS's on-the-fly data compression allows zlib (Deflate algorithm) or LZO.

JFFS2 stores filesystem indexes in memory whereas UBIFS stores indexes in flash. This directly impacts the scalability of JFFS2 as the tables must be rebuilt every time the volume is mounted. Also, the JFFS2 tables may consume enough system RAM that some images may be unusable.