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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had chance to use this yet but it's on my list to use with an AVR. Does anyone have any experience using it, how is it? I really like how it's unit tested and seems fairly well documented and even has github actions setup to build and test which seems to be rare for C libraries on github.

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I am using it in a commercial IoT project where the MCU flash is split into 2 parts: usual program area and a file system to store persistent and temporary data like ota. The main purpose is flash usage leveling which especially critical on MCU-internal flash, and as a bonus, it's just neat to have a real filesystem where you can work with FILE*. In about 2 years in the field - no issues.

It's one of the filesystem options in MicroPython and we've used it extensively for a number of (medical device) products. It's been bullet-proof for us.

Hi Matt,

I just proposed the exact same thing to a sibling commenter. I plan to add Littlefs to the next issue of Embedsys Weekly. If you feel confortable to share your experience with my readers on 3/4 sentences it would be fantastic.

It is a nice library. It's backend api is simple to hook into whatever storage scheme you choose to use. It's also nice to be able to disable wear leveling and use it as a fault tolerant private filesystem from an image file.

It's very nice to get your experience feedback. Thank you very much.

I'm writing Embedsys Weekly newsletter and so I have listed littlefs project for the next issue. Do you think you can eventually share to the reader your experience in few words? If you feel good with the idea, my email is embedsys@embedsysweekly.com

At my work, we are using littlefs on several products, it works quite well. The v1.X have performance issues when you have a lot of small files. But the v2.X solve them.

Compiling their example with the Arduino toolchain seems to fill up about 90% of an Uno's 32k flash space. I think that rules it out as usable on anything that doesn't have a larger amount than that.

Yes, it seems like that's a good reason to switch to a better board, if this is something you're interested in using.

For example, a Raspberry Pi Pico is $4 and has 2MB. There are many other nice options from Adafruit or Teensy.

I see that the Uno R3 is a popular product on Amazon but I don't really get the appeal.

The Uno has a _giant_ ecosystem behind it going back over a decade and it's more than enough for most beginner mcu projects. That's the appeal. Other than that, it's a pretty weak chip.

Is that an issue with Arduino? This PR [0] suggests a R/W compile is around 13k (or R/O for 5k) on an M0. I don't know if there'd be a big difference compiling for AVR though.

[0] https://github.com/littlefs-project/littlefs/pull/480

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