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LittleFS is an open-source, community driven project, designed and maintained by Christopher Haster (@geky).

LittleFS is by no means a finished project. There are a number of open challenges, mostly around performance and scalability, which require time to explore, solve, implement, and test.

This is my current roadmap, though it is highly susceptible to change:

  1. Explore a better metadata data-structure (self-balancing Dhara trees)
    • Reduce metadata compaction O(n^2) -> O(n log(n))
    • Enable different integer sizes
  2. Explore a better file data-structure (traditional B-trees)
    • Allow efficient random file writes
    • Allow logging-friendly APIs
    • Allow better block utilization for very large blocks
    • Allow data checksumming
  3. Explore more robust alternatives to the dir-tree's threaded linked-list
    • The threaded linked-list has been a large source of bugs and should go
  4. A global checksum system
    • Prevent "rollback" failure mode on checksum failures
    • Allow external storage of a global checksum for additional protection
  5. Metadata redundancy
    • Prevent metastability issues on powerloss
    • Allow optional metadata error-correction at the block level
  6. Garbage-collection APIs
    • Allow users to control when expensive garbage collection occurs
  7. Optional block free-list
    • Allow more efficient block allocation
    • Allow tracking of bad blocks to avoid reuse
  8. Data redundancy
    • Allow optional data error-correction at the block level
  9. Different integer sizes
    • 16-bit mode => potential RAM/code savings for 16-bit devices/small storage
    • 64-bit mode => >2 GiB files, etc

Donations allow me to dedicate more of my time to LittleFS, which is split between ongoing maintenance and this long-term roadmap. These are strictly donations, no work is guaranteed, but help in making the development of LittleFS sustainable is always appreciated.

If you would like to help a different way or have other requests, feel free to reach me at geky at geky.net.

Current sponsors 1

@fusedFET
Past sponsors 4
@kmetabg
Private Sponsor
@nedap
@Eclo

Featured work

  1. littlefs-project/littlefs

    A little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers

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