Datalight was a privately held software company specializing in power failsafe and high performance software for preserving data integrity in .
Overview and history
Datalight was founded in 1983 by Roy Sherrill, a former
Boeing engineer.
[" Ensuring that devices don't lose data." Tricia Duryee. The Seattle Times; July 16, 2007.][" Leadership Team ." Datalight. Retrieved 2010-08-23.] Datalight's initial products were two
DOS applications: Datalight
Small-C compiler and Datalight C-Bug debugger. A full
C compiler named Datalight C was available from Datalight between 1987 and 1993; Datalight C, developed by
Walter Bright, evolved into Zortech C and is now
Digital Mars.
[Eckel, Bruce. Using C++, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1989, p. 34.][ PC Magazine, Volume 7, Issues 18–19, p. 38.][ Walter Bright home page. Retrieved 2010-08-04.] Datalight C was also developed into an optimizing compiler called Datalight Optimum-C, which later became Zortech C++, the first native C++ compiler.
[" History of PC based C-compilers." Bob Stout. 1998.][ Walter Bright interview. Bitwise Magazine; May 2006.] In 1988, Datalight released C_thru_ROM, which provided embeddable C functions and C start-up code, allowing programs developed on DOS to run as standalone applications without DOS dependence.
[" Desktop DOS goes undercover to run embedded systems." David Shear. EDN; August 4, 1994.] In 1989, ROM-DOS 1.0 was released.
CardTrick was announced in 1993 to support the flash memory being built into . Card Trick later evolved into the embedded flash memory manager FlashFX in 1995, moving Datalight into the raw flash memory market. The company grew rapidly in the late 1990s, receiving the WA Fast 50 award for the fastest growing companies in Washington state in 1997 and 1998.
The first of four patents to eventually be assigned to Datalight, "Method and apparatus for allocating storage in a flash memory",[United States Patent 5860082: " Method and apparatus for allocating storage in a flash memory ."] was awarded in 1999, followed up with an additional FlashFX-related patent, "Method and system for managing bad areas in flash memory",[United States Patent 6260156: " Method and system for managing bad areas in flash memory ."] in 2001.
In 2003, Reliance, a reliable transactional embedded file system, was released; a related patent, "Reliable file system and method of providing the same",[United States Patent 7284101: " Reliable file system and method of providing the same ."] was awarded in 2007.
In 2009, Datalight released FlashFX Tera to support the growing size and complexity of NAND flash arrays. That same year, Reliance Nitro was released, building upon Reliance and adding a tree-based architecture to improve performance for large files (>100 MB) and large numbers of files.
In 2013, another file system related patent, "Method and Apparatus for Fault-tolerant Memory Management"[United States Patent 8572036: " Method and Apparatus for Fault-tolerant Memory Management ."] was issued.
In June 2019, the Finnish storage software and networking technology company Tuxera signed an agreement to acquire Datalight.[Nordic 9 Tuxera acquired Datalight from US.]
Products
Reliance family
Reliance
First released in 2003, Reliance is an embedded file system
[Miller, Drew. Black Hat Physical Device Security: Exploiting Hardware and Software, p. 49. Syngress, 2004. .] designed for applications with high reliability requirements.
[ Reliance Datasheet, p. 1.] Key features:
[" Reliance." Datalight. Retrieved 2010-08-13.]
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Provides immunity to data corruption, including after unexpected system interruption (e.g., power loss), via atomic transaction points.
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Does not need to check disk integrity at start-up, meaning a shorter boot time.
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Dynamic file system configuration for performance optimization.
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Full data-exchangeability with Microsoft Windows, via the Reliance Windows Driver.
Reliance has a maximum volume size of 2 TB and a maximum file size of 4 GB.[ Reliance Developer's Guide, ch. 1.]
Reliance Nitro
Released in 2009, Reliance Nitro is a file system developed from Reliance; it improved on the performance of original Reliance, primarily by adding a tree-based directory architecture facilitating faster look-ups. The maximum volume size on Reliance Nitro is 32 TB; maximum file size is constrained only by free space.
[ Reliance Nitro Developer's Guide, "Introduction".]
Reliance Windows Driver
Datalight provides Windows
device driver for both Reliance (Reliance Windows Driver; RWD) and Reliance Nitro (Reliance Nitro Windows Driver; RNWD); they provide exchangeability between Reliance-formatted media and Microsoft Windows. Both support
Windows Vista and
Windows XP; an older version of RWD supports Windows 2000. The drivers are bundled with tools to format media and a utility to check file system integrity.
FlashFX
Introduced in 1995, FlashFX is a flash media manager which allows applications to access flash memory as if it were a hard drive,
abstracting the complexity of flash media.
[" Optimizing Resident Flash Arrays in Windows CE Devices." Dennis Edwards and Keith Garvin. Dr. Dobb's Journal; November 01, 2001.][" The Rise to Dominance of NAND Flash ." Bill Graham. Wind River; November 24, 2009.] FlashFX operates either NAND or
NOR flash and supports numerous flash devices.
[" Thanks For The Memory ." William Wong. Electronic Design; May 21, 2009.]["." Eric Brown. eWeek; January 29, 2008.] It can be used with any file system.
Versions:
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FlashFX Pro: Supports around 200 flash chip part numbers and flash arrays up to 2 GB.
[" Flash Memory Drivers ." Datalight. Retrieved 2010-08-13.] Has pre-ported versions for Windows CE, VxWorks, Nucleus RTOS, and ThreadX.[ FlashFX Pro 3.0 Datasheet, p. 1.] FlashFX Pro is available for Windows Mobile (FlashFX Tera is not).
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FlashFX Tera: Supports around 300 flash chip part numbers and flash arrays up to 2 TB. Has pre-ported versions for Linux, Windows CE, and VxWorks.
[ FlashFx Tera Datasheet , p. 1.] FlashFX Tera supports multi-level cell NAND flash,["." Jonathan Angel. eWeek; April 15, 2010.] while FlashFX Pro does not; another improvement is Tera's error correction, which is more robust than Pro's.
Products using FlashFX include Arcom's PC/104 computer,[" PC/104 computer survives harsh environments." Warren Webb. EDN; February 3, 2000.] Curtis-Wright's Continuum Software Architecture,[" Curtiss-Wright Chooses Datalight's FlashFX Pro Flash Media Manager for Continuum Software Architecture Offering." Curtis-Wright. August 3, 2006.] Teltronic's HTT-500 handset,[" Customer Story: Teltronic ." ENEA. 2007.] and MCSI's PROMDISK disk emulator.[ PROMDISK . MCSI.]
XCFiles
XCFiles, released in June 2010, is an
exFAT-compatible file system aimed at consumer devices.
[ XCFiles, p. 1.] It allows embedded systems to support
SDXC, the SD Card Association standard for extended capacity storage cards.
Marketed as "independent of the target platform",
[ XCFiles FAQ , p. 2.] XCFiles is intended to be portable to any 32-bit platform which meets certain requirements (such as supporting semaphores and
signedness 64-bit integers).
[ exFiles User's Manual (v. 1.04), pp. 67, 72.]
XCFiles is marketed in Japan as 'exFiles' by A.I. Corporation; it was released there in April 2009.[" exFATファイルシステムの海外向け販売を開始 ". A.I. Corporation; July 6, 2010. ( Google translation.)]
ROM-DOS
ROM-DOS (sometimes called Datalight DOS
[" Datalight DOS Selected for Canon's New Line of Digital Still Cameras." Business Wire; February 23, 1999.]) was introduced in 1989 as an
MS-DOS compatible operating system designed for embedded systems.
[ ROM-DOS Datasheet, p. 1.] It includes backward compatibility build options allowing compatibility with specific versions of MS-DOS (e.g., DOS 5.01). ROM-DOS 7.1 added support for FAT32 and
long filename. ROM-DOS includes a compact TCP/IP stack;
[Jones, M. Tim. TCP/IP Application Layer Protocols for Embedded Systems, Appendix C: TCP/IP Protocol Stacks . Charles River Media, 2002. .] and SOCKETS, a
network socket API and connectivity package, is available as an optional add-on for ROM-DOS.
[ Datalight SOCKETS . Retrieved 2010-07-19.] The SDK comes with Borland C/C++ and
Turbo Assembler.
[ ROM-DOS Datasheet, p. 2.]
System requirements:[ ROM-DOS Product Manual, p. 6.][ ROM DOS 6.22. EMAC, Inc. 2010. The vendor's system requirements are somewhat higher: 18KB of RAM and 124K of space.]
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Intel 80186 or compatible
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10 KB of RAM
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54–72 KB of ROM or disk space (depending on version)
Some devices which use or used ROM-DOS are the Canon PowerShot Pro70,[ ADAM-4500 - PC-based Communication Controller. Advantech.] the Percon Falcon 325,[" Data Collection RF Scanners." Data ID Online.] several early PDAs (Tandy Zoomer, IBM Simon, HP OmniGo 100/120, Nokia 9000/9000i/9110/9110i), Casio Algebra FX Series graphing calculators, MCSI's PROMDISK,[ Intel Server RAID Controller U3-1L Low Profile (SRCU31L): Technical Product Specification, p. 12.] and, as of 2004, all Intel server board System Resource CDs included ROM-DOS.[" INSTALL.TXT for System Update Package (SUP) ." May 19, 2004.] Symbol's FMT 3000 came with a copy of ROM-DOS.[ FMT 3000 Software Manual , p. 41.]
Commands
The following list of commands is supported by ROM-DOS.
External links
