Demonstrating how system software work in a visual manner is an interesting problem, especially in embedded space. There is no UI or visual effects to WOW the audience. To evaluate the value system software components bring to an embedded design, the customer usually needs to configure our software on his embedded development board. This provides for comprehensive evaluation but can be a significant effort. . We run into this very often at Datalight since our primary products (FlashFX Pro and Reliance) are system level embedded software. One way we have attempted to demonstrate our software is to make a full-functional version of our software run on user’s desktop PC. This allows the customer to run the software without any special hardware in matter of minutes and understand the core working of our software. Once they believe there is value, the can request source code access and try it on the actual embedded hardware.

The first demonstration that we have built is for Datalight Reliance. This demo is available to all users who are registered for MyDatalight account. The video below shows how you can use this software on any Windows PC and understand how Reliance unique transactional design allows for 100% reliability against data corruption and how Dynamic Transaction Point technology allows developers to tune their file system even while the device is running.

Bothell, Wash., – August 12, 2008 – Datalight announced today that it has released new versions of Reliance™ and FlashFX® Pro, with pre-configured support for  MontaVista® Linux®. The new install experience includes simplified integration within MontaVista DevRocket, an Eclipse-based IDE that streamlines common embedded  development tasks. Dropped into DevRocket, Datalight products build as kernel loadable modules that work with a project’s OS image. Sample bootstrap code is also  supplied for developers who need to integrate the products into a boot loader.

“Developers choose MontaVista Linux for faster time-to-market, integration, and stable, fully tested code. We are pleased that Datalight has extended these benefits at  the flash memory file system level, and to provide embedded Linux developers with added performance and reliability,” said Dan Cauchy, Senior Director of Market Development, MontaVista Software.

Other upgrades include a read-only version of Reliance inside the Datalight Loader. This small footprint version permits a bootloader to load an OS image directly from a reliance partition. Devices benefit from risk-free “in-place OS upgrades” enabled by the application-controlled transaction point feature of Reliance. The new versions also feature enhancements in reliability, as well as support for a wide range of new flash parts. FlashFX Pro now supports Spansion NS-P, Samsung FlexOneNAND, Micron 55nm flash parts, and all CFI-compliant NOR parts. The Datalight flash file system solution is comprised of the Reliance file system and FlashFX Pro intelligent flash media manager. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology provides 100% immunity from file corruption, even after unexpected system interruption. Embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product, regardless of disk size.

FlashFX Pro features pre-written support for over 200 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller, and features wear leveling, bad block management, and garbage compaction for unrivaled performance. Datalight flash file system products are also available on other operating systems and integrated development environments.

Bothell, Wash., – August 12, 2008 – Datalight announced today that it has released new versions of Reliance™ and FlashFX® Pro with preconfigured support for Wind River Linux. The new install experience includes simplified integration with Wind River Workbench, an award-winning, Eclipse-based development platform. Dropped into Wind River Workbench, Datalight products build as kernel loadable modules that work with a project’s OS image. Sample bootstrap code is also supplied for users needing to integrate the products into a boot loader.

“Developers choose Wind River Linux for our broad range of hardware support and stable code base. Our VxWorks customers have enjoyed the benefits of the Datalight  flash file system platform for years, and we are pleased that Wind River Linux customers now have the option of adding Datalight performance and reliability to their designs,” said Paul Anderson, vice president of Linux product engineering at Wind River.

Other upgrades include a read-only version of Reliance inside the Datalight Loader. This small footprint version permits a boot loader to load an OS image directly from a  reliance partition. Devices benefit from risk-free “in-place OS upgrades” enabled by the application-controlled transaction point feature of Reliance.

The new versions also feature enhancements in reliability as well as support for a wide range of new flash parts. FlashFX Pro now supports Spansion NS-P, Samsung  FlexOneNAND, Micron 55nm flash parts and all CFI-compliant NOR parts.

The Datalight flash file system solution is comprised of the Reliance file system and FlashFX Pro intelligent flash media manager. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point technology provides 100 percent immunity from file corruption, even after unexpected system interruption.  embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product regardless of disk size. FlashFX™ Pro features prewritten  support for more than 200 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller and features wear leveling, bad block management and garbage compaction for unrivaled performance. Datalight flash file system products are also available on other operating systems including Wind River VxWorks.

Datalight FlashFX Pro ships as an evaluation version in all VxWorks distributions since version 6.5. Customers who need support for NAND flash on VxWorks chose FlashFX Pro for abstracting the intricacies of working with flash memory. FlashFX Pro provides Bad Block Management (BBM), Wear Leveling, Garbage collection and background compaction functionalities on VxWorks along with support for 200+ flash parts. VxWorks is one of the top OS amongst Datalight Reliance customers. This is because Reliance provides a 100% reliable file system that provides fast performance.

Given the popularity of VxWorks amongst our customer based, we have prospective VxWorks customers ask us how our products are installed and configured on that platform. This short blog post will try and answer these questions. If you have more questions, please leave a comment and we will get back to you.

Q: How does a customer install Datalight VxWorks products
We ship our products with an image of what would be put on a CD, so customers can extract our installation ZIP files into a temporary directory, and run SETUP.  This will install our product into a directory that they tell us (usually c:\dl\flashfx or c:\dl\reliance) and will add our CDF (WorkBench catalog files) in the appropriate place in the Workbench tree.
Q: How do they configure it?  If it’s a menu structure (like Tornado’s Project) where is the menu, what are the options, and what are their effect?

In Workbench and Tornado, FlashFX Pro shows up in the Catalog right next to the TFFS flash driver, and Reliance shows up right next to dosFS.  Our manuals for VxWorks provide step-by-step guidance on how our products can be configured using the VxWorks development IDEs
Q: What effort is involved in using the Datalight Reliance or FlashFX Pro file system on VxWorks?
Developers use the standard file system APIs of VxWorks (file open, file close, etc) like they would if dosFS or another file system and don’t need to know anything specific about the API of Reliance.  Same with FlashFX Pro – once we’re working in the environment, we’re a “disk”, and the people writing applications don’t need to know any special APIs.

Image via Wikipedia

Being in the flash memory management space for 15+ years, a very high number of our customers use our products on flash memory (NAND, NOR, NAND controllers, Fusion flash like Samsung OneNAND, etc). Now FlashFX Pro is designed only for flash memory but Datalight Reliance is a file system that works on all block devices. This includes hard drives, USB flash drives, removable cards like SD, CF, solid state drives (SSD), etc. The advantage Reliance brings to these devices is of reliability against data corruption, fast mount times and fast I/O throughput. It also mandates certain requirements on the physical media to ensure reliability against data corruption. We have had customers use Reliance on hard drives before and I want to share some requirements for Reliance to provide high reliability on rotating media. This post is specific to Linux but the general concepts should be applicable to all OSes.

Reliance is a transactional file system and at each transaction point it flushes all its internal caches and commits the data to disk in atomic operations. Primary requirement for Reliance to function on hard drives is that the hardware and the ATA driver must support the “FLUSH CACHE” command. The Linux IDE disk driver checks bits 12 and 13 of word 83 in the IDENTIFY DEVICE information to determine whether FLUSH CACHE is supported.  These bits are defined by the ATA-6 specification, and are not set in earlier drives.  The IDE disk driver will report whether it has detected this capability in a drive.  This is available in the system log.  A typical message will look like:

Jun  9 09:49:23 billr-qa kernel: [   18.621740] hda: cache flushes supported

Since there are a vast number of hard disks on the market and new ones are constantly being introduced (and old ones discontinued), it is a little difficult for Datalight to qualify all hard drives and recommend a specific one. Generally any disk that conforms to the ATA-6 specification and reports that it supports FLUSH CACHE should work correctly with Reliance.  Reliance reports whether it is able to use flush to ensure correct operation, the system log typically looks like this:

Jun  9 09:52:44 billr-qa kernel: [  240.283463] relfs: block device supports flush.

If this message appears in the log, Reliance should operate correctly when power is interrupted unexpectedly.

Datalight’s power interruption testing has been performed on a Western Digital AC29100D using kernel version 2.6.21.1

If you have any questions on the FLUSH CACHE on an OS other than Linux, please leave a comment.

Today we are announcing an update to our flash memory manager (FlashFX Pro) and file system (Reliance) products. The official press release will go on the wire shortly, but we wanted our blog audience to know about it first.

Here are the highlights on this release

FFXP  3.3.2
1.    Improved product reliability: This release includes number of bug fixes and product enhancements that improve the reliability of the product
2.    Support for CFI compliant NOR flash parts
3.    FlashFX Pro supports 200+ flash parts and with each release we add support for new flash parts from the top flash vendors. New Flash parts supported in this release include Spansion NS-P, Samsung FlexOneNAND and Micron 55nm parts
4.    VxWorks: Support added for VxWorks version 6.6.

5.    RTOS: Support for the Mentor Graphics Nucleus and ThreadX operating systems has been mainstreamed into the RTOS Porting Kit.

6.    WinCE: Support added for Windows CE 6 R2

Reliance 3.2.2

1.    Improved product reliability: This release includes number of bug fixes and product enhancements that improve the reliability of the product
2.    Datalight Loader, includes a read-only version of Reliance with a  very small footprint that allows bootloaders to load OS image from Reliance partitions. This allows devices to benefit from Reliance’s application controlled transaction point feature by enabling “in-place OS upgrades”. Contact Datalight support (support@datalight.com) to get more details on how to use Datalight Loader in your design

The entire press release is included below

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Datalight News

For information, contact:
Kerri McConnell, Director of Marketing
425.686.1069
kerri.mcconnell@datalight.com

New Datalight Products Support Microsoft Windows CE 6 R2 and Wind River VxWorks 6.6

Bothell, Wash., – June 26, 2008 – Datalight announced today that it has released new versions of its Reliance® and FlashFX™ Pro products, with support for Windows CE 6 R2 and VxWorks 6.6. The new versions feature enhancements in reliability, as well as support for a wide range of new flash parts. FlashFX Pro now supports Spansion NS-P, Samsung FlexOneNAND, Micron 55nm, and all CFI-compliant NOR parts.

A new feature for Reliance, the Datalight Loader now includes a read-only version of Reliance. This small footprint version permits a bootloader to load an OS image directly from a Reliance partition. Devices benefit from risk-free “in-place OS upgrades” enabled by the application-controlled transaction point feature of Reliance.

The Datalight flash file system solution is comprised of the Reliance file system and FlashFX™ Pro intelligent flash media manager. Reliance was designed from the ground up for high reliability applications. Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology provides 100% immunity from file corruption, even after unexpected system interruption. Embedded applications can benefit from faster boot times that remain consistent for the life of the product, regardless of disk size. FlashFX™ Pro features pre-written support for over 200 flash parts, works with virtually any NAND controller, and features wear leveling, bad block management, and background compaction for unrivaled performance. Datalight flash file system products are also available on Linux and other operating systems.

About Datalight

Datalight, Inc. headquartered just north of Seattle, Wash., develops technologies to enable risk-free mobile data. Datalight file system and device driver software ensures reliability, performance and flexibility, and is used worldwide on many of today’s most well-known devices.  For more information, visit http://www.datalight.com/, call 800.221.6630 or visit blog at http://blog.datalight.com

Reliance and Dynamic Transaction Point are trademarks of Datalight Inc. Other marks used herein are the property of the respective owners.

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Copyright © 2008 Datalight, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. DATALIGHT, Datalight, the Datalight Logo, FlashFX, FlashFX Pro, Reliance, ROM-DOS, 4GR, One-Boot, One-Boot+File, and Sockets are trademarks or registered trademarks of Datalight, Inc. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders. Specification and price change privileges reserved.