Merge tag 'docs-5.7' of git://git.lwn.net/linux

Pull documentation updates from Jonathan Corbet:
 "This has been a busy cycle for documentation work.

  Highlights include:

   - Lots of RST conversion work by Mauro, Daniel ALmeida, and others.
     Maybe someday we'll get to the end of this stuff...maybe...

   - Some organizational work to bring some order to the core-api
     manual.

   - Various new docs and additions to the existing documentation.

   - Typo fixes, warning fixes, ..."

* tag 'docs-5.7' of git://git.lwn.net/linux: (123 commits)
  Documentation: x86: exception-tables: document CONFIG_BUILDTIME_TABLE_SORT
  MAINTAINERS: adjust to filesystem doc ReST conversion
  docs: deprecated.rst: Add BUG()-family
  doc: zh_CN: add translation for virtiofs
  doc: zh_CN: index files in filesystems subdirectory
  docs: locking: Drop :c:func: throughout
  docs: locking: Add 'need' to hardirq section
  docs: conf.py: avoid thousands of duplicate label warning on Sphinx
  docs: prevent warnings due to autosectionlabel
  docs: fix reference to core-api/namespaces.rst
  docs: fix pointers to io-mapping.rst and io_ordering.rst files
  Documentation: Better document the softlockup_panic sysctl
  docs: hw-vuln: tsx_async_abort.rst: get rid of an unused ref
  docs: perf: imx-ddr.rst: get rid of a warning
  docs: filesystems: fuse.rst: supress a Sphinx warning
  docs: translations: it: avoid duplicate refs at programming-language.rst
  docs: driver.rst: supress two ReSt warnings
  docs: trace: events.rst: convert some new stuff to ReST format
  Documentation: Add io_ordering.rst to driver-api manual
  Documentation: Add io-mapping.rst to driver-api manual
  ...

1 files changed, 137 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..e6ee99762534
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/ubifs.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+===============
+UBI File System
+===============
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+UBIFS file-system stands for UBI File System. UBI stands for "Unsorted
+Block Images". UBIFS is a flash file system, which means it is designed
+to work with flash devices. It is important to understand, that UBIFS
+is completely different to any traditional file-system in Linux, like
+Ext2, XFS, JFS, etc. UBIFS represents a separate class of file-systems
+which work with MTD devices, not block devices. The other Linux
+file-system of this class is JFFS2.
+
+To make it more clear, here is a small comparison of MTD devices and
+block devices.
+
+1 MTD devices represent flash devices and they consist of eraseblocks of
+  rather large size, typically about 128KiB. Block devices consist of
+  small blocks, typically 512 bytes.
+2 MTD devices support 3 main operations - read from some offset within an
+  eraseblock, write to some offset within an eraseblock, and erase a whole
+  eraseblock. Block  devices support 2 main operations - read a whole
+  block and write a whole block.
+3 The whole eraseblock has to be erased before it becomes possible to
+  re-write its contents. Blocks may be just re-written.
+4 Eraseblocks become worn out after some number of erase cycles -
+  typically 100K-1G for SLC NAND and NOR flashes, and 1K-10K for MLC
+  NAND flashes. Blocks do not have the wear-out property.
+5 Eraseblocks may become bad (only on NAND flashes) and software should
+  deal with this. Blocks on hard drives typically do not become bad,
+  because hardware has mechanisms to substitute bad blocks, at least in
+  modern LBA disks.
+
+It should be quite obvious why UBIFS is very different to traditional
+file-systems.
+
+UBIFS works on top of UBI. UBI is a separate software layer which may be
+found in drivers/mtd/ubi. UBI is basically a volume management and
+wear-leveling layer. It provides so called UBI volumes which is a higher
+level abstraction than a MTD device. The programming model of UBI devices
+is very similar to MTD devices - they still consist of large eraseblocks,
+they have read/write/erase operations, but UBI devices are devoid of
+limitations like wear and bad blocks (items 4 and 5 in the above list).
+
+In a sense, UBIFS is a next generation of JFFS2 file-system, but it is
+very different and incompatible to JFFS2. The following are the main
+differences.
+
+* JFFS2 works on top of MTD devices, UBIFS depends on UBI and works on
+  top of UBI volumes.
+* JFFS2 does not have on-media index and has to build it while mounting,
+  which requires full media scan. UBIFS maintains the FS indexing
+  information on the flash media and does not require full media scan,
+  so it mounts many times faster than JFFS2.
+* JFFS2 is a write-through file-system, while UBIFS supports write-back,
+  which makes UBIFS much faster on writes.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS supports on-the-flight compression which makes
+it possible to fit quite a lot of data to the flash.
+
+Similarly to JFFS2, UBIFS is tolerant of unclean reboots and power-cuts.
+It does not need stuff like fsck.ext2. UBIFS automatically replays its
+journal and recovers from crashes, ensuring that the on-flash data
+structures are consistent.
+
+UBIFS scales logarithmically (most of the data structures it uses are
+trees), so the mount time and memory consumption do not linearly depend
+on the flash size, like in case of JFFS2. This is because UBIFS
+maintains the FS index on the flash media. However, UBIFS depends on
+UBI, which scales linearly. So overall UBI/UBIFS stack scales linearly.
+Nevertheless, UBI/UBIFS scales considerably better than JFFS2.
+
+The authors of UBIFS believe, that it is possible to develop UBI2 which
+would scale logarithmically as well. UBI2 would support the same API as UBI,
+but it would be binary incompatible to UBI. So UBIFS would not need to be
+changed to use UBI2
+
+
+Mount options
+=============
+
+(*) == default.
+
+====================	=======================================================
+bulk_read		read more in one go to take advantage of flash
+			media that read faster sequentially
+no_bulk_read (*)	do not bulk-read
+no_chk_data_crc (*)	skip checking of CRCs on data nodes in order to
+			improve read performance. Use this option only
+			if the flash media is highly reliable. The effect
+			of this option is that corruption of the contents
+			of a file can go unnoticed.
+chk_data_crc		do not skip checking CRCs on data nodes
+compr=none              override default compressor and set it to "none"
+compr=lzo               override default compressor and set it to "lzo"
+compr=zlib              override default compressor and set it to "zlib"
+auth_key=		specify the key used for authenticating the filesystem.
+			Passing this option makes authentication mandatory.
+			The passed key must be present in the kernel keyring
+			and must be of type 'logon'
+auth_hash_name=		The hash algorithm used for authentication. Used for
+			both hashing and for creating HMACs. Typical values
+			include "sha256" or "sha512"
+====================	=======================================================
+
+
+Quick usage instructions
+========================
+
+The UBI volume to mount is specified using "ubiX_Y" or "ubiX:NAME" syntax,
+where "X" is UBI device number, "Y" is UBI volume number, and "NAME" is
+UBI volume name.
+
+Mount volume 0 on UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs::
+
+    $ mount -t ubifs ubi0_0 /mnt/ubifs
+
+Mount "rootfs" volume of UBI device 0 to /mnt/ubifs ("rootfs" is volume
+name)::
+
+    $ mount -t ubifs ubi0:rootfs /mnt/ubifs
+
+The following is an example of the kernel boot arguments to attach mtd0
+to UBI and mount volume "rootfs":
+ubi.mtd=0 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs
+
+References
+==========
+
+UBIFS documentation and FAQ/HOWTO at the MTD web site:
+
+- http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs.html
+- http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/ubifs.html