[U-Boot] [PATCH 0/5] Add support for using an UBI volume for environment

[Scott Wood]

On 02/12/2013 10:04:09 AM, Tom Rini wrote:
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> On 02/11/2013 09:37 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
> > On 02/08/2013 02:07:21 PM, Joe Hershberger wrote:
> >> NAND is not good at handling absolute addresses to sectors for
> >> storing particular data.  The current implementation of the NAND
> >> env support works around this in several ways such as storing a
> >> pointer to the sector in the OOB of the first sector (interferes
> >> with some CRC) or supporting a range of sectors (which unless it
> >> is huge is not guaranteed to be safe).  None of these options
> >> address wear-leveling concerns or bad block handling.
> >>
> >> Accessing the u-boot env from UBI eliminates these concerns.
> >> However, it does require some of the basic settings for finding
> >> the UBI env to be in the default u-boot env.
> >
> > The downside is this moves us further away from having an
> > environment available before relocation (e.g. loaded by SPL),
> > which is important not just for serial config but also hwconfig,
> > which can affect how RAM is set up among other things.
> >
> > Maybe the "OOB of first sector" approach could be changed to be
> > more like how bad block tables are allocated, with a special
> > marker in the env block's own OOB that we scan for.
> 
> There's pluses and minuses to "throw more stuff in UBI".  So long as
> it doesn't break the ability to have env pre-relocation (and it
> shouldn't, we already support env in a file), is there a problem here?
> 
> Or just hoping to encourage other robust methods?

The latter.

-Scott