The flush function should finish all the pending jobs. But if
somebody else is doing a work, this function should wait and let
it finish.
This patche uses rw semaphore for synchronization purpose - it
just looks quite convinient.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When the WL worker is moving an LEB, the volume might go away
occasionally. UBI does not handle these situations correctly.
This patch introduces a new mutex which serializes wear-levelling
worker and the the 'ubi_wl_put_peb()' function. Now, if one puts
an LEB, and its PEB is being moved, it will wait on the mutex.
And because we unmap all LEBs when removing volumes, this will make
the volume remove function to wait while the LEB movement
finishes.
Below is an example of an oops which should be fixed by this patch:
Pid: 9167, comm: io_paral Not tainted (2.6.24-rc5-ubi-2.6.git #2)
EIP: 0060:[<f884a379>] EFLAGS: 00010246 CPU: 0
EIP is at prot_tree_del+0x2a/0x63 [ubi]
EAX: f39a90e0 EBX: 00000000 ECX: 00000000 EDX: 00000134
ESI: f39a90e0 EDI: f39a90e0 EBP: f2d55ddc ESP: f2d55dd4
DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 0033 SS: 0068
Process io_paral (pid: 9167, ti=f2d54000 task=f72a8030 task.ti=f2d54000)
Stack: f39a95f8 ef6aae50 f2d55e08 f884a511 f88538e1 f884ecea 00000134 00000000
f39a9604 f39a95f0 efea8280 00000000 f39a90e0 f2d55e40 f8847261 f8850c3c
f884eaad 00000001 000000b9 00000134 00000172 000000b9 00000134 00000001
Call Trace:
[<c0105227>] show_trace_log_lvl+0x1a/0x30
[<c01052e2>] show_stack_log_lvl+0xa5/0xca
[<c01053d6>] show_registers+0xcf/0x21b
[<c0105648>] die+0x126/0x224
[<c0119a62>] do_page_fault+0x27f/0x60d
[<c037dd62>] error_code+0x72/0x78
[<f884a511>] ubi_wl_put_peb+0xf0/0x191 [ubi]
[<f8847261>] ubi_eba_unmap_leb+0xaf/0xcc [ubi]
[<f8843c21>] ubi_remove_volume+0x102/0x1e8 [ubi]
[<f8846077>] ubi_cdev_ioctl+0x22a/0x383 [ubi]
[<c017d768>] do_ioctl+0x68/0x71
[<c017d7c6>] vfs_ioctl+0x55/0x271
[<c017da15>] sys_ioctl+0x33/0x52
[<c0104152>] sysenter_past_esp+0x5f/0xa5
=======================
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Make the code more consistent by requiring the caller to lock the
ubi->volume_mutex, because this is what we do for updates.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Add ref_count field to UBI volumes and remove weired "vol->removed"
field. This way things are better understandable and we do not have
to do whold show_attr operation under spinlock.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
If we fail halfway through sysfs file creation, we may just call
sysfs remove function and it will delete all the files we created.
For non-existing files it will also be OK - the remove functions
just return -ENOENT.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
This patch fixes error codes of the functions - if the device number
is out of range, -EINVAL should be returned. It also removes unneeded
try_module_get call from the open by name function.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Error path in volume creation is bogus. First of, it ovverrides the
'err' variable and returns zero to the caller. Second, ubi_assert()
in the release function is wrong.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When a volume is opened, get its kref via get_device() call.
And put the reference when closing the volume. With this, we
may have a bit saner volume delete.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Pass volume description object to the EBA function which makes
more sense, and EBA function do not have to find the volume
description object by volume ID.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Similarly to ltree_entry_slab, it makes more sense to create
and destroy ubi_wl_entry slab on module initialization/exit.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Since the ltree_entry slab cache is a global entity, which is
used by all UBI devices, it is more logical to create it on
module initialization time and destro on module exit time.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
This patch silences the following warning :
drivers/mtd/ubi/vmt.c:73: warning: 'ret' may be used uninitialized in this function
gcc can't see that we always initialize ret in all situations where it is
actually used. The one case where it's not initialized is when we BUG(),
but gcc doesn't know that we won't then continue and use an uninitialized
'ret'.
This patch results in code that does exactely the same as before, but it
also makes gcc shut up, so we generate one less line of warning noise.
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
The idea of this interface belongs to Adrian Hunter. The
interface is extremely useful when one has to have a guarantee
that an LEB will contain all 0xFFs even in case of an unclean
reboot. UBI does have an 'ubi_leb_erase()' call which may do
this, but it is stupid and ineffecient, because it flushes whole
queue. I should be re-worked to just be a pair of unmap,
map calls.
The user of the interfaci is UBIFS at the moment.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
First allocate the necessary eraseblocks, then the optional ones.
Otherwise it allocates all PEBs for bad EB handling, and fails
on then following EBA LEB allocation.
Reported-by: Adrian Hunter <ext-adrian.hunter@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When NAND detects an ECC error, it returns -EBADMSG. It does not
stop reading requested data if one page has an ECC error, it keeps
going and reads all the requested data. If it fails to read all
the data, it does not return -EBADMSG, but returns the error code
which reflects the reason of the failure.
But some drivers may have bugs (e.g., OneNAND had) and stop reading
after the first ECC error, so it returns -EBADMSG. In turn, UBI
propagates this up to the caller. The caller will treat this as
"all the requested data was read, but there was an ECC error".
So we change the error code to -EIO if it is -EBADMSG and the read
length is less then the requested length. We also add an assertion,
so if UBI debugging is enabled, UBI will bug.
Pointed-to-by: Adrian Hunter <ext-adrian.hunter@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
The task_struct->pid member is going to be deprecated, so start
using the helpers (task_pid_nr/task_pid_vnr/task_pid_nr_ns) in
the kernel.
The first thing to start with is the pid, printed to dmesg - in
this case we may safely use task_pid_nr(). Besides, printks produce
more (much more) than a half of all the explicit pid usage.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: git-drm went and changed lots of stuff]
Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>
Cc: Dave Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Slab constructors currently have a flags parameter that is never used. And
the order of the arguments is opposite to other slab functions. The object
pointer is placed before the kmem_cache pointer.
Convert
ctor(void *object, struct kmem_cache *s, unsigned long flags)
to
ctor(struct kmem_cache *s, void *object)
throughout the kernel
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coupla fixes]
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Fix the following warning:
drivers/mtd/ubi/eba.c: In function 'ubi_eba_init_scan':
drivers/mtd/ubi/eba.c:1116: warning: 'err' may be used uninitialized in this function
Pointed-to-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When the UBI device is nearly full, i.e. all LEBs are mapped, we have
only one spare LEB left - the one we reserved for WL purposes. Well,
I do not count the LEBs which were reserved for bad PEB handling -
suppose NOR flash for simplicity. If an "atomic LEB change operation"
is run, and the WL unit is moving a LEB, we have no spare LEBs to
finish the operation and fail, which is not good. Moreover, if there
are 2 or more simultanious "atomic LEB change" requests, only one of
them has chances to succeed, the other will fail with -ENOSPC. Not
good either.
This patch does 2 things:
1. Reserves one PEB for the "atomic LEB change" operation.
2. Serealize the operations so that only on of them may run
at a time (by means of a mutex).
Pointed-to-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Similar reason as in case of the previous patch: it causes
deadlocks if a filesystem with writeback support works on top
of UBI. So pre-allocate needed buffers when attaching MTD device.
We also need mutexes to protect the buffers, but they do not
cause much contantion because they are used in recovery, torture,
and WL copy routines, which are called seldom.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Use GFP_NOFS flag when allocating memory on I/O path, because otherwise
we may deadlock the filesystem which works on top of us. We observed
the deadlocks with UBIFS. Example:
VFS->FS lock a lock->UBI->kmalloc()->VFS writeback->FS locks the same
lock again.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
I can't find anything guaranteeing that 'ubi_num' cannot be <0 in
drivers/mtd/ubi/kapi.c::ubi_open_volume(), and in fact the code
even tests for that and errors out if so. Unfortunately the test
for "ubi_num < 0" happens after we've already used 'ubi_num' as
an array index - bad thing to do if it is negative.
This patch moves the test earlier in the function and then moves
the indexing using that variable after the check. A bit safer :-)
Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <jesper.juhl@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
I hit those situations and found out lack of print messages. Add more prints
when erase problems occur.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Fix "symbol shadows an earlier one" warnings. Although they are harmless
but it does not hurt to fix them and make sparse happy.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Coverity (1769) found the following problem: if the erase counter
overflow check triggers, ec_hdr is leaked.
Moving the allocation after the overflow check should take care of it.
Signed-off-by: Florin Malita <fmalita@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
To be able to convert kmalloc + memset(..., 1, ...) to kzalloc this patch
reverses the logic around 'buf'.
Signed-off-by: Mariusz Kozlowski <m.kozlowski@tuxland.pl>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Slab destructors were no longer supported after Christoph's
c59def9f22 change. They've been
BUGs for both slab and slub, and slob never supported them
either.
This rips out support for the dtor pointer from kmem_cache_create()
completely and fixes up every single callsite in the kernel (there were
about 224, not including the slab allocator definitions themselves,
or the documentation references).
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
cdev.c whines in current git:
drivers/mtd/ubi/cdev.c: In function `major_to_device':
drivers/mtd/ubi/cdev.c:67: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
Shut it up.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Do not switch to read-only mode in case of -EINTR and some
other obvious cases. Switch to RO mode only when we do not
know what is the error.
Reported-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
The use of try_module_get(THIS_MODULE) in ubi_get_device_info does not
offer real protection against unexpected driver unloads, since we could
be preempted before try_modules_get gets executed. It is the caller who
should manipulate the refcounts. Besides, ubi_get_device_info is an
exported symbol which guarantees protection when accessed through
symbol_get.
Signed-off-by: Fernando Luis Vazquez Cao <fernando@oss.ntt.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
I was experiencing overflows in multiplications for
volume->used_bytes in vmt.c & vtbl.c, while creating & resizing large volumes.
vol->used_bytes is long long however its 2 operands vol->used_ebs &
vol->usable_leb_size
are int. So their multiplication for larger values causes integer overflows.
Typecasting them solves the problem.
My machine & flash details:
64Bit dual-core AMD opteron, 1 GB RAM, linux 2.6.18.3.
mtd size = 6GB, volume size= 5GB, peb_size = 4MB.
heres patch which does the fix.
Signed-off-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Hi,I came across problem of having two leb with same sequence no.This
happens when we continuously write one block again and again and reboot
machine before background thread erases those blocks.
The problem here was,when we find two blocks with same sequence no,we take
the higher one,but we were not updating max seq no,so next block may have
the same seqnum.
This patch solves this problem.
Signed-off-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
There is signed multiplication assigned to unsigned ei.addr in io.c.
This causes wrong addresses for big multiplication.This patch solves the
problem.
Signed-off-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
atomic_leb_change() is only allowed for dynamic volumes, so set
the volume type correctly.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Increase UBI devices couter after the message, not before.
Signed-off-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Do not check volumes which are currently in use because thay may be
in inconsistent state.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When volume creation fails, we have to set ubi->volumes[vol_id]
back to NULL.
This patch also tweaks some debugging stuff.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Replacing (n & (n-1)) in the context of power of 2 checks
with is_power_of_2
Signed-off-by: Vignesh Babu <vignesh.babu@wipro.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
ubi->vtbl is allocated using vmalloc() in vtbl.c empty_create_lvol(),
but it is freed in build.c with kfree()
Signed-off-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Do not call 'ubi_wl_put_peb()' if the LEB was unmapped.
Reported-by: Gabor Loki <loki@inf.u-szeged.hu>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Kill UBI's homegrown endianess handling and replace it with
the standard kernel endianess handling.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
- don't do access_ok + get/put user but use the proper macro
- remove useless checks
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Use coma at the the last elements of structure initializer.
Daniel Stone's explanation:
Because it turns:
- .attr = foo
+ .attr = foo,
+ .bar = baz
into:
+ .bar = baz,
i.e., far less likely to screw up a merge.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
UBI allocates temporary buffers of PEB size, which may be 256KiB.
Use vmalloc instead of kmalloc for such big temporary buffers.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Add few comments above ubi_scan_add_used() to explain why it is so
complex. Requested by Satyam Sharma <satyam.sharma@gmail.com>.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
In case of static volumes, make emulated MTD device size to
be equivalent to data size, rather then volume size.
Reported-by: John Smith <john@arrows.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
There were several bugs in volume table creation error path. Thanks to
Satyam Sharma <satyam.sharma@gmail.com> and Florin Malita <fmalita@gmail.com>
for finding and analysing them: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/3/274
This patch makes ubi_scan_add_to_list() static and renames it to
add_to_list(), just because it is not needed outside scan.c anymore.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Mark variables in drivers/* with uninitialized_var() if such a warning
appears, and analysis proves that the var is initialized properly on all
paths it is used.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>
Currently, the freezer treats all tasks as freezable, except for the kernel
threads that explicitly set the PF_NOFREEZE flag for themselves. This
approach is problematic, since it requires every kernel thread to either
set PF_NOFREEZE explicitly, or call try_to_freeze(), even if it doesn't
care for the freezing of tasks at all.
It seems better to only require the kernel threads that want to or need to
be frozen to use some freezer-related code and to remove any
freezer-related code from the other (nonfreezable) kernel threads, which is
done in this patch.
The patch causes all kernel threads to be nonfreezable by default (ie. to
have PF_NOFREEZE set by default) and introduces the set_freezable()
function that should be called by the freezable kernel threads in order to
unset PF_NOFREEZE. It also makes all of the currently freezable kernel
threads call set_freezable(), so it shouldn't cause any (intentional)
change of behaviour to appear. Additionally, it updates documentation to
describe the freezing of tasks more accurately.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: build fixes]
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Acked-by: Nigel Cunningham <nigel@nigel.suspend2.net>
Cc: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Cc: Gautham R Shenoy <ego@in.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
SLAB_CTOR_CONSTRUCTOR is always specified. No point in checking it.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Cc: Steven French <sfrench@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Michael Halcrow <mhalcrow@us.ibm.com>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Cc: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Cc: Steven Whitehouse <swhiteho@redhat.com>
Cc: Roman Zippel <zippel@linux-m68k.org>
Cc: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Cc: Dave Kleikamp <shaggy@austin.ibm.com>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
Cc: Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mark.fasheh@oracle.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Jan Kara <jack@ucw.cz>
Cc: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
I have never seen a use of SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL. It is only supported by
SLAB.
I think its purpose was to have a callback after an object has been freed
to verify that the state is the constructor state again? The callback is
performed before each freeing of an object.
I would think that it is much easier to check the object state manually
before the free. That also places the check near the code object
manipulation of the object.
Also the SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL callback is only performed if the kernel was
compiled with SLAB debugging on. If there would be code in a constructor
handling SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL then it would have to be conditional on
SLAB_DEBUG otherwise it would just be dead code. But there is no such code
in the kernel. I think SLUB_DEBUG_INITIAL is too problematic to make real
use of, difficult to understand and there are easier ways to accomplish the
same effect (i.e. add debug code before kfree).
There is a related flag SLAB_CTOR_VERIFY that is frequently checked to be
clear in fs inode caches. Remove the pointless checks (they would even be
pointless without removeal of SLAB_DEBUG_INITIAL) from the fs constructors.
This is the last slab flag that SLUB did not support. Remove the check for
unimplemented flags from SLUB.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
UBI (Latin: "where?") manages multiple logical volumes on a single
flash device, specifically supporting NAND flash devices. UBI provides
a flexible partitioning concept which still allows for wear-levelling
across the whole flash device.
In a sense, UBI may be compared to the Logical Volume Manager
(LVM). Whereas LVM maps logical sector numbers to physical HDD sector
numbers, UBI maps logical eraseblocks to physical eraseblocks.
More information may be found at
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html
Partitioning/Re-partitioning
An UBI volume occupies a certain number of erase blocks. This is
limited by a configured maximum volume size, which could also be
viewed as the partition size. Each individual UBI volume's size can
be changed independently of the other UBI volumes, provided that the
sum of all volume sizes doesn't exceed a certain limit.
UBI supports dynamic volumes and static volumes. Static volumes are
read-only and their contents are protected by CRC check sums.
Bad eraseblocks handling
UBI transparently handles bad eraseblocks. When a physical
eraseblock becomes bad, it is substituted by a good physical
eraseblock, and the user does not even notice this.
Scrubbing
On a NAND flash bit flips can occur on any write operation,
sometimes also on read. If bit flips persist on the device, at first
they can still be corrected by ECC, but once they accumulate,
correction will become impossible. Thus it is best to actively scrub
the affected eraseblock, by first copying it to a free eraseblock
and then erasing the original. The UBI layer performs this type of
scrubbing under the covers, transparently to the UBI volume users.
Erase Counts
UBI maintains an erase count header per eraseblock. This frees
higher-level layers (like file systems) from doing this and allows
for centralized erase count management instead. The erase counts are
used by the wear-levelling algorithm in the UBI layer. The algorithm
itself is exchangeable.
Booting from NAND
For booting directly from NAND flash the hardware must at least be
capable of fetching and executing a small portion of the NAND
flash. Some NAND flash controllers have this kind of support. They
usually limit the window to a few kilobytes in erase block 0. This
"initial program loader" (IPL) must then contain sufficient logic to
load and execute the next boot phase.
Due to bad eraseblocks, which may be randomly scattered over the
flash device, it is problematic to store the "secondary program
loader" (SPL) statically. Also, due to bit-flips it may become
corrupted over time. UBI allows to solve this problem gracefully by
storing the SPL in a small static UBI volume.
UBI volumes vs. static partitions
UBI volumes are still very similar to static MTD partitions:
* both consist of eraseblocks (logical eraseblocks in case of UBI
volumes, and physical eraseblocks in case of static partitions;
* both support three basic operations - read, write, erase.
But UBI volumes have the following advantages over traditional
static MTD partitions:
* there are no eraseblock wear-leveling constraints in case of UBI
volumes, so the user should not care about this;
* there are no bit-flips and bad eraseblocks in case of UBI volumes.
So, UBI volumes may be considered as flash devices with relaxed
restrictions.
Where can it be found?
Documentation, kernel code and applications can be found in the MTD
gits.
What are the applications for?
The applications help to create binary flash images for two purposes: pfi
files (partial flash images) for in-system update of UBI volumes, and plain
binary images, with or without OOB data in case of NAND, for a manufacturing
step. Furthermore some tools are/and will be created that allow flash content
analysis after a system has crashed..
Who did UBI?
The original ideas, where UBI is based on, were developed by Andreas
Arnez, Frank Haverkamp and Thomas Gleixner. Josh W. Boyer and some others
were involved too. The implementation of the kernel layer was done by Artem
B. Bityutskiy. The user-space applications and tools were written by Oliver
Lohmann with contributions from Frank Haverkamp, Andreas Arnez, and Artem.
Joern Engel contributed a patch which modifies JFFS2 so that it can be run on
a UBI volume. Thomas Gleixner did modifications to the NAND layer. Alexander
Schmidt made some testing work as well as core functionality improvements.
Signed-off-by: Artem B. Bityutskiy <dedekind@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Frank Haverkamp <haver@vnet.ibm.com>
