Summary nodes
There is one overriding disadvantage to JFFS2: since there is no on-chip index, the directory structure has to be deduced at mount-time by reading the log from start to finish. At the end of the scan, you have a complete picture of the directory structure of the valid nodes, but the time taken is proportional to the size of the partition. It is not uncommon to see mount times of the order of one second per megabyte, leading to total mount times of tens or hundreds of seconds.
To reduce the time to scan during mount, summary nodes became an option in Linux 2.6.15. A summary node is written at the end of the open erase block just before it is closed. The summary node contains all of the information needed for the mount-time scan, ...
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