Reliance Nitro
Turbo-boost your data-critical systems
Tuxera Reliance Nitro™ is a transactional file system carefully engineered to protect critical system and user data from corruption with copy-on-write design. It ensures full data integrity while providing high performance with configurable user options. Reliance Nitro is designed to work with embedded flash memory, such as eMMC, UFS and SSD. And with Tuxera FlashFX Tera flash translation layer, Reliance Nitro works on top of any NAND or NOR device.
Customer success story
The solution fulfilled the customer’s expectations. Extensive testing (as it is usual for spaceflight equipment) proved that all requirements have been met or exceeded. Especially the all-time file system integrity was “impressive,” according to the customer’s own assessment.
—Airbus development team
Why choose Tuxera Reliance Nitro
Take control over data-at-risk
Reliance Nitro is a copy-on-write transactional file system, ensuring that live data is never overwritten and eliminating data corruption. Our Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology gives you full control when data is committed to disk allowing you to optimize the balance between performance and data-at-risk in case of sudden power interruption or ungraceful shutdown.
Superior performance
Rapid performance is a hallmark of any powerful file system. Reliance Nitro delivers throughput as close to the physical maximum of the storage media as possible. The tree-based directory structure of Nitro enables fast file operations, particularly when working with many small files. Our solution also performs better on sequential writes than standard FAT, and up to 4X faster on random writes as well. Plus our Smart Discard algorithms provide the best overall performance, without increasing latency.
Fast mount time
If a power failure should occur, Reliance Nitro has a turbocharged mount time. There’s no need to replay a journal or perform any other file system checks – Reliance Nitro always keeps the disk in a known good state. This and other performance features result in faster mount times.
Ensure reliability with self diagnostics
At the heart of our file system tools are full metadata and optional file data CRCs (Cyclic Redundancy Checks). These diagnostics allow developers to continuously monitor data reliability in any embedded system. Unlike other file systems such as ext4, Reliance Nitro is capable of monitoring both user data and metadata to detect inconsistencies and provide early warning of imminent flash failure and/or data discrepancies.
Extensive design flexibility
We designed Reliance Nitro to give system developers the freedom to design exactly to their specifications. Our software offers a performance-enhancing discard interface for NAND- and NOR-based devices, plus flexible configuration options for compile and run time. We provide SDKs for Linux and VxWorks, and the capability to port to any 32- or 64-bit real-time operating system (RTOS).
Award-winning support
Tuxera’s team of file system experts will support you all the way from evaluation to implementation, going above and beyond to ensure your project performs flawlessly and on schedule. Our annual support subscriptions for Reliance Nitro are available with a choice of service level options, so you can select the right degree of support that suits your needs.
Technical data
Dynamic Transaction Point™ technology
Customize the balance between performance and data at risk. All writes are atomic.
CRC32 for file data and metadata
Cyclic Redundancy Checks offer continuous monitoring of data integrity for ultimate reliability.
Supports advanced storage features
Uses features in storage devices to gain performance and security advantages, such as secure delete.
SDKs and porting
Linux & VxWorks SDKs. Porting possible (with POSIX-like functions) for any 32- or 64-bit RTOS, including proprietary operating systems.
Multi-threaded architecture
Reduces latency between multiple file access requests for high-quality multi-media experience.
Resources
A closer look at Reliance Nitro features
Dynamic Transaction Points™
Reliance Nitro is a transactional flash file system, comprised of the working state and the committed state. Original data (the committed state) is preserved until the new data (the working state) is written and a transaction point is performed. During operation on the working state, all file system modifications – including changes to directories, files and metadata – are stored on an area of the media that is currently unused and does not contain committed state data. The possibility of corruption is eliminated because the data of the new transaction is written to an unused portion of the media. Writing to an unused portion of the media allows the previous state of the file system to be untouched. Valid data from the previous transaction is always available.
This varies greatly from the FAT file system where some data is overwritten when updating a file, and journaling file systems like ext4, where a log of each transaction is kept at the cost of performance.
With Reliance Nitro’s Dynamic Transaction Point™ settings, transaction points are run-time configurable. Setting options include automatic, timed, or application-controlled options, giving embedded developers the flexibility they need for their specific build.
Because Reliance Nitro always maintains a “known good state,” it has a mount time advantage particularly after power loss. Journaling file systems such as ext3 and ext4 will need to perform random reads to build the journal. Since Reliance Nitro always keeps the disk in a known good state, there is no need to run integrity checks during the file system boot, even after a disorderly shutdown.
The tree-based architecture of the Reliance Nitro core results in faster access to file metadata, user file allocated blocks, and free blocks. This results in a binary search for files and their data blocks, which means superior throughput when handling many small files.
Reliance Nitro demonstrates superior file system metadata handling. When reading and writing smaller files, this file system overhead is far more important than the raw throughput available. In our testing on an i.MX6 Sabre SD embedded board, using a PNY 4GB SD card for storage, Reliance Nitro created 1000 files in 24 seconds, compared to almost five minutes for the native file system solution.
In Linux, Reliance Nitro is fully integrated into the kernel caching mechanisms. For non-Linux RTOS solutions, Tuxera provides a fully configurable block device cache, allowing higher performance in some use cases. The chart below shows the impact of this cache on VxWorks read and write operations.
The sequential read and write performance for Tuxera is considerably better than DosFS. While Reliance Nitro has excellent random write performance in its standard configuration, it can be improved even further with cache support.
Test setup: The media used in this test has a maximum performance of 5.1 mb/sec sequential write and a random write speed of at most 96 kb/sec. Write performance in the charts is measured with a cache – the Reliance Nitro cache for Tuxera, the DosFS cache for VxWorks. Actual performance may vary according to hardware and software used.
Reliance Nitro is engineered to write to the media only when required, providing an improvement in the endurance of the underlying flash media. We monitored the number of erases required by the FSIOTest, which measures flash file system I/O. With the default configuration, Tuxera’s solution erases 70% less than the ext4 file system on Linux.
Customers we've helped with Reliance Nitro
When to use Reliance Nitro
Reliance Nitro is the ideal choice when you need to manage and store mission-critical data, while still maintaining high performance – such as video recording applications, mobiles, data-intensive automotive systems, and avionics and aerospace applications.
Get Tuxera RELIANCE NITRO
For software evaluations, pricing quotes, and further inquiries about Tuxera Reliance Nitro file system, get in touch with us.
