LeCramFS: An efficient compressed file system for flash-based portable consumer devices

Cost-effectiveness is one of the most critical factors in the development of portable consumer devices. The use of compression techniques is a simple but effective solution for achieving such cost-effectiveness. This paper gives a comprehensive analysis of file system level compression techniques for portable consumer devices. Since conventional compressed file systems are optimized for disklike devices and relatively abundant computing resources, they are not suitable for portable devices with small amount of memory and weak processing power. This paper presents the design and implementation of LeCramFS, which is a new read-only compressed file system designed for small portable devices and flash memory. Experiments by implementation show that the proposed file system outperforms conventional ones in terms of memory-efficiency and I/O performance.