Reliance Edge v2.6

Reliance Edge v2.6, January 2022

Common Code Changes

• Introduce a new on-disk layout where directory data blocks have a signature, CRC (checksum), and sequence number, like all other metadata blocks.
  • Support for the original on-disk layout is retained. Old disks do not need to be reformatted.
  • Formatter options have been introduced to allow formatting with the original on-disk layout if desired.
  • The FSE API continues to use the original on-disk layout because it does not have directory data blocks.
• Add new "rollback" APIs: red_rollback() and RedFseRollback(). Thanks to Jean-Christophe Dubois for suggesting and implementing these APIs.
• Updated the block buffer cache to support configurable buffer alignment to allow the buffers to be used in DMA transfers. This adds a new macro to redconf.h: REDCONF_BUFFER_ALIGNMENT.
• Implement an alternative block buffer cache (commercial kit only) to improve file system performance. Features of the new cache:
  • No longer limited to a maximum of 255 block buffers. The new cache can support many thousands of buffers, which can improve performance on systems which have sufficient RAM for many block buffers.
  • Support for RAM-constrained systems is retained. The new cache and the old cache use about the same amount of RAM given the same buffer count.
  • Optional write-gather buffer which can improve write throughput serveralfold in some use cases. This adds a new macro to redconf.h: REDCONF_BUFFER_WRITE_GATHER_SIZE_KB. For the open source release, this new macro must have a value of 0U.
• Optimized block-aligned writes to make one pass over the metadata rather than two passes, which slightly improves performance of such writes.
• Critical error messages now print the file name and line number where the error message originated, to assist with debugging.
• Fixed an endian-swapping bug that prevented little-endian host tools from operating an a volume from a big-endian target, and vice versa.
• Fix a bug where, after deleting all the files in a directory, the directory could still have a nonzero size, preventing it from being deleted. This bug could only manifest when the directory entry size was not an integral divisor of the block size. In other words, when the following was true: REDCONF_BLOCK_SIZE % (REDCONF_NAME_MAX + 4) != 0

INTEGRITY Port Changes

Fixed several bugs which affected the client-server configuration (libredfs.a). The unified configuration (libredfs_unified.a) was unaffected by these issues. The bugs were:

• A client was unable to mount a volume that was already mounted by another client.
• If a client unmounted a volume with the MNT_FORCE flag, it would fail to close its open handles if another client had the volume mounted, which could lead to spurious EMFILE or EBUSY errors later on. Note that this bug could not manifest, due to the prior bug preventing multiple client mounts.
• When the Reliance Edge checker (fsck_redfs) was invoked, the client library was sending the wrong opcode to the server, causing the volume to be reformatted rather than checked.

SafeRTOS Port Changes

Added support for SafeRTOS in the commercial kit. SafeRTOS is a safety-critical real-time operating system from WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems. See the "SafeRTOS Integration" chapter of the Developer's Guide for further details on SafeRTOS support.

Reliance Edge v2.5.1

Reliance Edge v2.5.1, May 2020

Common Code Changes

• Rebrand from Datalight to Tuxera. For details, please read the following: https://www.tuxera.com/blog/tuxera-and-datalight-continue-forward-as-one-unified-brand-tuxera/
• Fix a v2.5 regression where the checker (available in the commercially-licensed SDK) did not work when run as a standalone application.

Linux Port Changes

• Fix a v2.5 regression where the RAM disk was erroneously allocated as a zero-sized buffer.

Win32 Port Changes

• Fix a v2.5 regression where the powerint and errinject test projects (provided with the commercially-licensed SDK) were not functional.

Reliance Edge v2.5

Reliance Edge v2.5, April 2020

Common Code Changes

• By popular demand, implement support for automatically detecting the sector count and sector size at run-time, as an alternative to specifying those values at compile-time.
  • This change is backward compatible with old redconf.c/redconf.h configuration files, which will continue to work as before. The configuration files only need to be updated if enabling this new feature is desired. To enable the feature, download the v2.5 version of the Reliance Edge Configuration Utility and select the "Auto" checkbox for the sector count or sector size.
  • Related to this change, a new file has been added to Reliance Edge: bdev/bdev.c. If you have your own build system or project which lists all the Reliance Edge source files, please update it to include this new file.
  • The block device OS service (osbdev.c) has a new API to query the sector count and sector size: RedOsBDevGetGeometry(). If you implemented your own version of osbdev.c for a previous version of Reliance Edge, to update to v2.5 you must add an implemention of this new API. See os/stub/services/osbdev.c for a template. If you do not need the new feature, the API can be stubbed to return -RED_ENOTSUPP.
• Implement a block allocation optimization that improves write performance in some circumstances.
• Add red_umount2() to the POSIX-like API. It is similar to red_umount() except that unmount flags can be specified. A flag is provided to force an unmount even if there are open handles.

FreeRTOS Port Changes

• Remove the F_DRIVER example implementation of the block device service, which was deemed obsolete because support for FAT SL was removed in FreeRTOS v10.

INTEGRITY Port Changes

• Implement support for the MNT_RDONLY and MNT_NOTRIM flags, used with the mount() system call.
• Implement support for the MNT_FORCE flag in the unmount() system call, which has the effect of forcing an unmount even if there are open handles.
• Calling mount() when Reliance Edge is already mounted now fails and sets errno to EBUSY; whereas previously it did nothing and returned success. The new behavior is consistent with the behavior of the native file systems.
• If mount() or unmount() is passed a mount point with extraneous trailing path separators, they now fail and set errno to EINVAL. This fixes a bug where using trailing path separators would seem to succeed, but the VFS would fail to update the mount point array correctly, which could cause problems for subsequent operations.

FUSE Port Changes

• Fix build errors in non-default configurations.

Reliance Edge v2.4

Reliance Edge v2.4, November 2019

Common Code Changes

• Fixed a bug which caused the maximum inode size to be miscalculated in some configurations with larger block sizes (8 KB and up).
• Add support for a sector size and block size of 128 bytes (the previous minimum was 256 bytes). This is primarily useful when small-capacity nonvolatile RAM is used as the storage device.
• red_sync() and red_close() have been fixed to work with read-only volumes.
• Add red_mount2() to the POSIX-like API. It is similar to red_mount() except that mount flags can be specified. Flags are provided for mounting read-only and (in the commercial kit) to control whether discards are issued.
• Add red_fstrim() to the POSIX-like API (commercial kit only). The API is used to discard free space, similar to the fstrim utility on Linux systems.
• The REDCONF_API_POSIX_FSTRIM macro has been added to redconf.h to specify whether red_fstrim() should be included. Existing redconf.h files must be updated by opening and saving them with the updated Configuration Utility.
• RedOsBDevDiscard() (which only exists in the commercial kit) has been updated to return a REDSTATUS value, instead of returning void.
• MVStressTest, a new stress test that can exercise multiple file system volumes, has been added to the commercial kit.

Reliance Edge v2.3

Reliance Edge v2.3, January 2019

Common Code Changes

• Add support for red_sync() to the POSIX-like API, including the new RED_TRANSACT_SYNC automatic transaction flag and requisite configuration option in the Reliance Edge Configuration Utility.
• Add discard testing to BDevTest (available in the commercial kit).
• Fix bugs affecting multivolume use cases caused by incorrect use of "current volume" global variables. These bugs could cause spurious I/O errors and metadata corruption.
• Fix a bug in checker (available in the commercial kit): an array indexing error would cause the wrong link count to be printed when link count corruption was detected.

INTEGRITY Port Changes

• Add support for the storage driver API introduced in INTEGRITY v11.7.
• Add INTEGRITY v11.7.x-compatible example projects for the INTEGRITY ARM Simulator and the Renesas R-Car H3 Starter Kit.
• Instead of unconditionally transacting all volumes, the INTEGRITY sync() system call now calls red_sync(). Transactions will only be performed on volumes which set the RED_TRANSACT_SYNC automatic transaction flag.
• Fixed a bug which resulted in errors when mounting more than one volume.
• An EINVAL error is now returned by mount() if the Reliance Edge mount point does not start with "//". Because of how INTEGRITY parses paths, the "//" has always been required; and while this was documented, it was not enforced in the code, which could lead to subtle errors.

Reliance Edge v2.2.1

Reliance Edge v2.2.1, June 2018

Common Code Changes

• Fix bugs in the implementation of the sector offset feature added in Reliance Edge v2.2. Anyone who set the sector offset to a value other than zero is strongly encouraged to upgrade.
• Fix a minor bug in the POSIX-like API where operations which are not allowed on the root directory -- such as deleting, renaming, or recreating it -- would set red_errno to RED_EINVAL rather than the appropriate errno value.
• Fix a bug in the POSIX-like API Test Suite which caused a link error if relative paths were enabled but rename was disabled.
• Fix minor documentation issues.
• Fix a test bug which was causing the simulated power interruption test in projects/powerint to fail. This test is only provided with the commercial kit.

INTEGRITY Port Changes

• Fix a bug in the block device code which would fail to report an error and leave the sector size uninitialized, later causing a memory violation.
• Update to support binary and text modes with fopen(), such as "w+b" or "rt". Regardless of open mode, Reliance Edge, like the native file systems, does not perform newline conversions.
• Minor fixes and enhancements to the INTEGRITY port documentation.
• Fix a path problem in the host/Makefile for the bbb-app-unified and bbb-app-clientserv example projects.

FreeRTOS Port Changes

• Fix a bug in the F_DRIVER example implementation of the block device service. According to the FreeRTOS documentation, the release function pointer in the F_DRIVER structure is allowed to be NULL, but the old code was calling that function unconditionally, without first ensuring it was non-NULL. The updated code will only call release when it is non-NULL.

Linux Port Changes

• Add support for discards on compatible block devices (commercial kit only).
• Add locking to the FUSE port to fix multithreading issues.

Reliance Edge v2.2

Reliance Edge v2.2, December 2017

Common Code Changes

• The Reliance Edge Configuration Utility has been updated to support specifying a sector offset for each volume. This allows Reliance Edge to be used on partitioned storage devices without osbdev.c customization. To upgrade an old redconf.c to be compatible with this change, the sector offset must be manually added to the entry for each volume in redconf.c, for example:
  • Before: { 512U, 65536U, false, 1024U, 0U, "VOL0:" }
  • After: { 512U, 65536U, 0U, false, 1024U, 0U, "VOL0:" }

INTEGRITY Port Changes

• Reliance Edge can now be used from more than one AddressSpace, via the new client-server implementation. For cases where only one AddressSpace is using Reliance Edge and the client-server overhead is undesirable, a unified library is also offered; it runs in the same AddressSpace as the application, similar to the v2.1 release.
• The block device implementation has been updated to support IDE/ATA/SATA devices.

U-Boot Port Changes

• Added support for the Universal Boot Loader (U-Boot) in the open-source kit. This allows a system using U-Boot to boot from an operating system image or kernel image stored on a Reliance Edge file system volume.
• See the "U-Boot Integration" chapter of the Developer's Guide for further details on U-Boot support.

Reliance Edge v2.1

Reliance Edge v2.1, October 2017

Common Code Changes

• Added optional support for current working directories, relative paths, and dot and dot-dot handling. This includes the new red_chdir() and red_getcwd() APIs.
• A volume path prefix, by itself, is now a valid reference to the root directory on that volume. Assuming the path prefix is "VOL0:" and the path separator character is '/', previously red_opendir("VOL0:/") would succeed and red_opendir("VOL0:") would fail. Now both will succeed. This results in more intuitive behavior when the volume path prefix is changed to look like a directory, such as "/sdcard"; red_opendir("/sdcard") and red_chdir("/sdcard") intuitively look like they should work, and now they do.
• Updated the imgcopy utility to open files in binary mode. When used on Windows, this fixes a problem where Windows attempted to perform newline conversion in binary files, corrupting the file data.
• Fixed a bug in the POSIX-like API Test Suite which caused it to fail when run on a volume other than volume zero. Fixed another bug which caused it to fail when the volume name was unusually long.
• Added an option to FSIOTest to control flush frequency for the sequential write and sequential rewrite tests. Default behavior is unchanged.

INTEGRITY Port Changes

• Added support for the INTEGRITY RTOS in the commercial kit. Reliance Edge integrates into the INTEGRITY file system layer so that system calls like open() or read() work with Reliance Edge; there is no need to update an application to use Reliance Edge's POSIX-like API.
• Example projects for the BeagleBone Black are provided.
• For the time being, the osbdev.c implementation is only known to work with the SD card driver supplied with the BeagleBone Black BSP. It is known not to work with the IDE driver used on x86 PCs. Other storage drivers have not been tested.
• See the "INTEGRITY Integration" chapter of the Developer's Guide for further details on INTEGRITY support. Please read this chapter before using Reliance Edge on INTEGRITY.

FreeRTOS Port Changes

• Moved the several example implementations in osbdev.c into header files.
• Added a "stub" example, which is now the default implementation for FreeRTOS, and which deliberately does not compile. This is to make it obvious that FreeRTOS users need to make modifications to osbdev.c for their environment.
• Added support for using Datalight FlashFX Tera as a block device. This support only exists in the commercial kit.
• The Atmel Studio projects for the SAM4E-EK and SAM4S Xplained Pro boards are no longer included in the open source kit; they are still available in the commercial kit.

Reliance Edge v2.0

Reliance Edge v2.0, January 2017

• Added support for Linux as a host environment
  • All "host" projects may now be built in either Windows or Linux using the
    make command. The formatter and image builder are built, and the checker
    and image copier are also built in the commercial kit.
  • An additional host tool has been added for Linux only: redfuse. It is a
    File System in User Space (FUSE) implementation, allowing a Reliance Edge
    volume to be mounted directly on Linux for easy access. It is built from
    the host project folder using the command make redfuse.
  • The OS-specific API test (commercial kit only) is now ported to run on Linux
    for the purpose of verifying the FUSE implementation.
• Fixed a bug that could leave a directory in an invalid state after removing
  files. For example, an affected directory might report a non-zero length even
  after all files had been deleted.
• Fixed a bug that would leave the driver in a bad state if a mount operation
  failed due to missing or corrupt metaroot blocks.
• The configuration utility now has keyboard shortcuts for opening and saving
  the configuration.

Reliance Edge v1.0.3

Reliance Edge v1.0.3, June 2016

• Added support for static memory allocation configuration in FreeRTOS
  version 9. No common code changes.