R&D: Lightweight and Configurable Flash Filesystem for Low-Power Devices

Journal of Low Power Electronics and Applications has published an article written by Ondrej Kachman, Peter Malík, Department of Intelligent Digital Systems, Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská Cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava, Slovakia, Marcel Baláž, Department of Intelligent Digital Systems, Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská Cesta 9, 845 07 Bratislava, Slovakia, and R-DAS, s.r.o., Research and Development Company, Ilkovičova 2, 842 16 Bratislava, Slovakia, Libor Majer, and Gábor Gyepes, R-DAS, s.r.o., Research and Development Company, Ilkovičova 2, 842 16 Bratislava, Slovakia.

Abstract: “Low-power embedded devices are widely used in sensor networks, monitoring systems, and industrial applications. These devices typically rely on internal flash memory, where storage is constrained by bootloaders, communication stacks, and other software. Adding external memory increases cost and energy consumption, making efficient memory utilization essential. This article presents key design concepts for developing an efficient, lightweight, and reliable embedded filesystem. It introduces an improved version of the configurable flash filesystem (CFFS), designed to maximize memory utilization, minimize flash wear, and support portability across hardware platforms and operating systems. Reliability mechanisms integrated into CFFS are also discussed. We compare CFFS with widely used low-power embedded filesystems – LittleFS, SPIFFS, and FDS – highlighting its advantages in memory efficiency and reduced flash memory wear. Experimental results demonstrate that CFFS achieves up to 99% memory utilization while significantly reducing erase operations.“