[U-Boot-Users] Re: Latest changes to cmd_nand.c

Dave Ellis DGE at sixnetio.com
Mon Apr 19 21:04:57 CEST 2004


Wolfgank Denk wrote:

> To: "David Müller (ELSOFT AG)"
> In message <407FCCDA.6040508 at elsoft.ch> you wrote:
> >
> > What was the reason to make a new command "nand read.jffs2s" to handle
> > bad block skipping in the read case.
> > 
> > Why not just integrate the bad block skipping into the standard
> > "read.jffs2" command.
> 
> Good questions.
> 
> > IMHO the "original functionality" is broken. The "nand write" command
> > skips over bad blocks by default, while "nand read" and (even worse)
> > "nandboot" don't.
> 
> I agree. Can you please submit a patch?

I implemented the current nand read.jffs2 bad block handling so that
both the amount of the nand read and memory written would always be
the amount requested. If I ask for 2 MiB and there are bad blocks,
there would be some unknown amount of memory at the end with random
data and I didn't see a good way to tell the jffs2 code to ignore it.
Initializing all the memory to 0xff to account for that would have
slowed my boot process too much.

The read.jffs2 command could skip bad blocks and pad the data with 0xff 
at the end instead so that the total bytes read is still always what was
requested. This change to the "original functionality" wouldn't break 
any code (like mine :-) ) that depends on all of the destination memory
being defined. I should have done it that way originally, but I didn't 
think of it.

It seems to me that the current functionality is fine for jffs2 and the 
jffs2s version is needed when you are not actually using jffs2. I 
think we should reserve read.jffs2 for jffs2 use. Then it can be optimized
to read only the data really needed for jffs2. If it is used for other
purposes these optimizations would break the other uses.  

If what is really needed (and it isn't for jffs2) is what nandboot should (but 
doesn't) do, which is read enough blocks to get a certain amount of _good_
data, there should be a new command, something like "nand read.good". This
would need a new option flag for nanda_rw().

Dave Ellis




More information about the U-Boot mailing list