FullFAT 1.1.0 Coming Soon!

The roadmap for FullFAT has changed quite dramatically over the last 24 hours. I’ve been performance profiling all aspects of FullFAT, particularly with respect to directory traversal, and file opening. So far I’ve been able to make gains of more than a 1000x improvement.

This performance optimisation is going to continue of the next few days.

Because of this huge, and much needed, improvement I’ve decided to make prepare for a 1.1.0 release. This will be 100% API compatible with the 1.0.x series. This now means that the FullFAT re-write which was going to be released under the 1.1.x series, will now be known as the FullFAT 2.x.x series.

New features for 1.1.x:

Massive Performance Improvements.
Guid Partition Table (GPT) support.
Working Hash table for near instant shortname lookup.
Many bug-fixes, and stability improvements.

What will the 2.x.x series mean?

New, but semantically similar API’s (API compatible with E-FS).
Programatically Isolated Architecture.
Fully encapsulated modules.
Strictly defined module interfaces. (No pointers between modules).
Even better directory & file handling than 1.1.x series.
Much smaller, and efficient I/O sub-system.
New driver model.
Ability to deal with Storage Media removal without an error.
Proper Error checking and reporting. (Allowing problems to be identified with precision).
Smaller memory footprint.
Associative Caching.
Better I/O performance.
More modular.
Better handling of Short Name conversion.
Legal LFN support.
Written to a much stricter coding standard.
In-built handling of Wild-Card’s for FindFirst(), and FindNext() API’s.
Making directory operations involving the API more efficient.

It’s a lot of work to do, however many of these features are transferable from my E-FS project, allowing both projects to benefit from each other. FullFAT 2.0.0 is estimated for release by the end of July 2010, and E-FS around September 2010.

Discuss:

2 Responses to “FullFAT 1.1.0 Coming Soon!”

Dan
13-Feb-10

I think you need to create a linux build that runs on fullfat entirely, this would be the real test to see if it really is faster.

Then you can compare load times of ubuntu in fat and ubuntu in fullfat? you may want to contact linux developers…

Also you may wish to try the same with efs.
James
20-Feb-10

Dan,

The point of FullFAT is to be faster compared to other open-source drivers that are designed for embedded systems. FullFAT alone will never be as fast as a fully featured Linux system. Thats because Linux systems always have large amounts of memory to index the entire directory structures into a special tree. They also populate HASH table index’s to make file lookups really fast.

Plus linux has a really big caching system that speeds up disk access a lot.

FullFAT enables some of these features for systems that have a bit of memory.

FullFAT is still being integrated into ReactOS, and so very soon we’ll have a Windows driver based on FullFAT which can directly replace Microsoft’s own driver. When this is complete, I shall be interested to do some performance comparisons.

James

FullFAT 1.1.0 Coming Soon!