Dynamic tail packing to optimize space utilization of file systems in embedded computing systems

Abstract

Embedded computing systems usually have limited computing power, RAM space, and storage capacity due to the consideration of their cost, energy consumption, and physical size. Some of them such as sensor nodes and embedded consumer electronics only have a small-sized flash memory as their storage with a (simple) file system to manage their data, which are usually of small sizes. However, the existing file systems usually have low space utilization on managing small files and the tail data of large files. In this work, we propose a dynamic tail packing scheme to optimize the space utilization of file systems by dynamically aggregating/packing the tail data of (small) files together. The proposed scheme was implemented in the file system of Linux operating systems to evaluate its capability. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme could significantly improve the space utilization of existing file systems.