Several articles and posts have been written this week about worn-out flash memory in Tesla controllers. When reading some of those articles, I was struck by a thought - what if the real root cause is improper wear leveling?

When thinking about reliability, many suggest that the media is most of the problem. Here we explain some of the file system choices for reliability, and how data integrity differs from fail safety. We also examine how detection of a problem can lead to possible solutions – or at least more graceful failures.

With Tuxera, Datalight returns to Flash Memory Summit, and I am happy to report that the embedded designs are making a comeback - primarily in Automotive.

Once thought to be in decline, raw flash media is definitely on the rise in embedded designs. A relatively new form factor using the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) has advantages compared to earlier (and larger) packages of parallel flash. This brief article mentions a few of these, comparing the two options.

On Linux, the recently introduced fscrypt framework provides new file system encryption options, and this support will be required in future versions of Android. For developers who used the journal to make user data more reliable, fscrypt forces them to abandon that option. Fortunately, Reliance Nitro provides encryption and reliability in one package.

In the next few weeks, Datalight will release a new version of Reliance Nitro with support for the the Linux fscrypt framework, a high-level tool for management of Linux filesystem encryption. Support for this framework will be required for file systems in future releases of Google's Android operating environment. The only Linux file systems that support this feature are Reliance Nitro, ext4, F2FS and UBIFS.

The performance and lifetime benefits of discards (also known as Trim) require a complete path between the media and the file system. Recently introduced to Green Hills INTEGRITY and Wind River VxWorks, this interface is crucial for NAND flash media. Customers can now take advantage of Datalight's discard functionality on Linux, INTEGRITY, and VxWorks.

We had nice weather in Nürnberg for Embedded World 2019. Here is our brief report on the proceedings.

NAND clock parameters are not something set by the ordinary embedded developer. Usually they are provided as part of the BSP for the embedded hardware board. if your project makes changes to the NAND media, the processor, or even the length of the traces between those two components, these NAND parameters may be something you have to update to achieve full functionality.

The heartwarming story of a farmer in need, a tech savvy neighbor and the support team that helped them save the day.