freebsd announce - Mar 2012 - Foundation Announces NAND File System for FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Semihalf, an
embedded solutions company, has been awarded a grant to bring their
comprehensive NAND Flash file system and storage stack to FreeBSD.
This technology enables FreeBSD to natively manage NAND Flash
devices, satisfying a crucial requirement for many applications
needing access to fast, reliable, non-volatile storage.

FreeBSD is widely used as the OS foundation of embedded appliances
both small and large.  Semihalf's NAND Flash stack opens new
opportunities for FreeBSD in this space, where size, cost, or
performance, mandate the use of direct attached NAND Flash.

Made possible by matching funds from Juniper Networks, this FreeBSD
Foundation grant covers the costs of transferring technology
developed for Juniper Networks by Semihalf to the FreeBSD
project.  This will ensure that the NAND framework meets
community standards and can be easily maintained and enhanced.

Highlighting the return on investment offered by this kind of
technology transfer, FreeBSD Foundation president Justin T. Gibbs,
noted:

"Open sourcing enhancements that do not expose 'business critical
intellectual property' reduces the cost of managing a FreeBSD
distribution that has been customized for a product.  The NAND
subsystem is a perfect example of how technology transfer
benefits both the FreeBSD community and its commercial users.
We'd like to thank Semihalf and Juniper for partnering with us
to make the code available under a BSD license"

The NAND Flash subsystem consists of a driver framework for NAND
controllers and memory chips, a NAND device simulator and a fault
tolerant, log-structured file system, tailored to meet the unique
challenges of NAND flash storage.  The package includes all the
tools, utilities and documentation needed to deploy this technology
in custom applications.

"A reliable file system that supports NAND Flash is critical for
Juniper's ongoing success," said Marcel Moolenaar, Distinguished
Engineer, Juniper Networks.  "But since storage isn't Juniper's
core
business, we were eager to find a solution that would put the
implementation and support of the file system in the most
capable hands. We reached out to Semihalf and ultimately the
Foundation to help us achieve our goals. Juniper cannot be more
pleased to have the NAND Flash file system and NAND Flash
framework present in the next major FreeBSD version as a
standard feature and under the care of the community."

"We are very glad to have the NAND framework made available
for the general FreeBSD audience, reaffirming the system as a
versatile platform for appliances and other embedded and
industrial designs," said Rafal Jaworowski of Semihalf.

The Foundation is pleased to be working with Semihalf again. They
were previously awarded a grant to bring "Flattened Device Tree"
support to FreeBSD.  This new feature in FreeBSD 9.0 has been
well received by the FreeBSD community.