Dear Jagan,
I'm not sure I fully understand your question. SPI flash is just a medium that has sectors/pages/blocks (call it however you want). You are free to store data with any structure you like on it. So if you like - you can store FAT file-system on it. That's true that maybe storing a FAT file-system that has frequent write operations on SPI flash is not a good idea, both because of speed and because of flash wear. But that is an entirely different question. There are still many cases when the data does not change frequently and FAT on SPI flash can be useful.
Best, Vasili
On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:49 PM, Jagan Teki jagannadh.teki@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Vasili Galka vasili@visionmap.com wrote:
Hi,
On our system, we are interested in keeping all files, including the OS image and U-Boot second stage on FAT filesystem residing on a SPI flash.
I'm not a file-system expert, but I've a basic question like how does/well a SPI flash(mtd) device have FAT support on it. Generally flash file-systems were categories to do the job right?
I have not found existing U-Boot support for such functionality. Have I missed it?
In any case, I'm willing to implement this, do you see it reasonable incorporating such code into U-Boot? (if it passes review of course)
I note about design: As our chip (TI's AM335x) does not support direct boot from FAT stored on SPI, I plan reserving section at the beginning of SPI flash for the first stage boot loader and having the filesystem after it.
thanks!
Jagan.