NAND Framework in HEAD.

[Grzegorz Bernacki]

Hello,

I would like to annouce merging of the project/nand branch into HEAD. 
The purpose of this project was to create a complete environment 
supportng NAND Flash devices in FreeBSD.

The NAND Flash environment consists of a driver framework for NAND 
controllers and memory chips, a NAND device simulator and a fault 
tolerant, log-structured file system (NANDFS), tailored to meet the 
unique challenges of NAND flash storage. The package includes all the 
tools, utilities and documentation needed to deploy this technology in 
custom applications.

The NAND Flash environment consists of several distinct components:
   - NAND framework (drivers harness for NAND controllers and NAND chips)
   - NAND simulator (NANDsim)
   - NAND file system (NAND FS)
   - Companion tools and utilities
   - Documentation (manual pages)

NAND FS adopts log-structured approach and some parts of its internal 
design are derived from the new implementation of the log-structured 
file system (NILFS), with some concepts rooting in the original (now 
legacy) BSD log-structured file system (LFS).

The NAND FS has the following major features:
   - Hard links
   - Symbolic links
   - Case-sensitive, case-preserving
   - Snapshots
     – No limit on the number of snapshots (only volume-limited)
     – Mountable as read-only file systems
     – Simultaneously mountable (there can be a writable mount concurrently
       mixed with a number of read-only snapshots)
   - Redundant super block
   - Metadata
     – POSIX file permissions
     – Creation timestamps
     – Last content modification timestamps
     – Last metadata change timestamps
     – Checksum / ECC

Additional documentation related to project can be found at:
http://wiki.semihalf.com/moin.cgi/FreeBSD/NAND

The NAND Flash Framework was developed by Semihalf. Juniper Networks and 
the FreeBSD Foundation kindly sponsored releasing the code to the 
FreeBSD community.

regards,
grzesiek