[U-Boot-Users] DiskOnChip, filesystems, and other booting options

[Udi Finkelstein]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 10:13:42 +0200, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:

>> OK, so where to I stand now?
>> 1. My kernel correctly identifies the D.O.C but for some reason manages
>> to
>> mount it only partially. /dev/mtdchar0 is non functional, but /dev/nftla
>> seems
>> to work between reboots. I can correctly partition the D.O.C using fdisk,
>>  and
>> the format is kept when I leave fdisk and re-run it, btu once I reboot,
>> all
>> the partitioning done is lost.
>
>That rings a bell to me. We fixed exactly such a problem once.
>
>In the old version of the code some internal data structures  of  the
>NFTL  driver, which are initialized only at boot-time, become invalid
>after you run nftl_format.
>
>See my message "DOC / NFTL problem, and fix" from Aug  28,  2002,  to
>the MTD mailing list:
>http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2002-August/005853.html
>I don't know if they  ever  accepted  the  patch,  and/or  if  it  is
>included  with  your  version of the MTD tools. Just in case I attach
>this patch again below.

OK, I've taken the patch, and it's not in the latest linuxppc_2_4 tree on
which I'm working (when I began working, this was 2.4.20-pre7 I think its now
in -rc1).

I had to do only minimal changes (one actually - ioctl no. 9 and 10 were
occupied, so now your MEMREVALIDATE ioctl is now 11 instead of 9).

Surprisingly (or not...), my /dev/nftla partition now works! I formatted it
under ext2 and it survived reboots without getting corrupted.

Now I have another problem - when I write my working kernel on the doc at
sector 0, and read it back, booting it fails with a CRC error, and 'cmp'
fails.

when I look at the first 16-32 bytes before/after saving/loading the image on
the DOC, it seems that the corruption is only at part of the image, and that
its reproducible (retrying get the same corruption).

>> I think this part of my questions should be sent to the MTD list I guess.

Peeking at the latest CVS code for MTD, it seems the codebase got very far off
the MTD snapshot we use.

>
>Agreed.
>
>
>Best regards,
>
>Wolfgang Denk

thanks,
Udi