CleanFS Filesystem Introduction

For years, the FAT filesystem was the preferred choice for embedded systems, memory cards and in general small storage devices. Right now, there are applications that require simple file systems but without the limitations of FAT.

CleanFS or the Clean filesystem is a new filesystem designed to be simple to implement, with features that make it a good replacement for FAT in embedded systems, where the limitations of FAT become problematic.

The basic ideas behind CleanFS are:

• No more complex than FAT32
• Should lift or improve the following limitations in FAT32:
  • File names limited to 255 characters
  • File names not supporting UTF-8
  • File size limited to 4 GB
• Easily embeddable, with minimum dependencies
• Hardware agnostic
• Minimize hardware I/O
• Minimize wasted space in data structures