[U-Boot] Broken ecc.size when switching between sw and hw ecc (beagleboard)
For the beagleboard, ecc.size is not explicitly set when doing 'nandecc sw'. If it's not set for the NAND_ECC_SOFT case in nand_scan_tail, it's set to 256 bytes.
When doing 'nandecc hw', ecc.size is set to 512 bytes. Hence, when changing back to 'nandecc sw' ecc.size remains at 512 bytes and suddenly the format has changed.
It seems the current nandecc command needs to set this explicitly, but also needs to be augmented to be able to select the newly added 4/8-bit BCH ECC.
But it also seems like nandecc selection should be more generic than for omap3 (currently it lives in arch/arm/cpu/armv7/omap3/board.c).
I have seen that TI did some work on this previously in the PSP04.02.00.07 release of u-boot and linux (2.6.37).
Is there ongoing work in this area? I'd be happy to help out if I can.
(I noticed the nand dump.oob seems to have been fixed in the u-boot-nand-flash repo.)
Thanks, Orjan
On 02/29/2012 06:12 AM, Orjan Friberg wrote:
For the beagleboard, ecc.size is not explicitly set when doing 'nandecc sw'. If it's not set for the NAND_ECC_SOFT case in nand_scan_tail, it's set to 256 bytes.
When doing 'nandecc hw', ecc.size is set to 512 bytes. Hence, when changing back to 'nandecc sw' ecc.size remains at 512 bytes and suddenly the format has changed.
It seems the current nandecc command needs to set this explicitly, but also needs to be augmented to be able to select the newly added 4/8-bit BCH ECC.
Yes, that looks like a bug in omap_nand_switch_ecc().
But it also seems like nandecc selection should be more generic than for omap3 (currently it lives in arch/arm/cpu/armv7/omap3/board.c).
ECC mode is normally not something that you want to be runtime switchable, as changing it usually changes the on-flash format. It also requires driver cooperation -- the actual implementation (as opposed to the command-line wrapper) is in drivers/mtd/nand/omap_gpmc.c.
If we end up with multiple drivers that need to expose this sort of functionality, maybe we can consider moving the command line wrapper to common code.
-Scott
On 02/29/2012 10:00 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
ECC mode is normally not something that you want to be runtime switchable, as changing it usually changes the on-flash format. It also requires driver cooperation -- the actual implementation (as opposed to the command-line wrapper) is in drivers/mtd/nand/omap_gpmc.c.
Are you saying that it shouldn't be switchable through a command line option (but rather based on information in the partition table or something similar), or are you saying that we shouldn't need different ECC modes for different parts of the flash (boot ROM vs. software implementations, whether block 0 has different ECC requirement etc)?
On 03/01/2012 03:17 AM, Orjan Friberg wrote:
On 02/29/2012 10:00 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
ECC mode is normally not something that you want to be runtime switchable, as changing it usually changes the on-flash format. It also requires driver cooperation -- the actual implementation (as opposed to the command-line wrapper) is in drivers/mtd/nand/omap_gpmc.c.
Are you saying that it shouldn't be switchable through a command line option (but rather based on information in the partition table or something similar), or are you saying that we shouldn't need different ECC modes for different parts of the flash (boot ROM vs. software implementations, whether block 0 has different ECC requirement etc)?
I'm saying that right now it's an OMAP-specific requirement and the implementation of necessity involves the OMAP driver. If another driver grows this as a requirement, we can consider refactoring so the command line frontend is common.
Different ECC modes for different parts of the flash is unfortunate, but sometimes mandated by circumstance. The NAND subsystem isn't really set up to handle this, though changing it temporally is a hackish substitute.
-Scott
On 03/01/2012 06:32 PM, Scott Wood wrote:
I'm saying that right now it's an OMAP-specific requirement and the implementation of necessity involves the OMAP driver. If another driver grows this as a requirement, we can consider refactoring so the command line frontend is common.
Different ECC modes for different parts of the flash is unfortunate, but sometimes mandated by circumstance. The NAND subsystem isn't really set up to handle this, though changing it temporally is a hackish substitute.
Ok, thanks for clarifying.
On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 03:00:49PM -0600, Scott Wood wrote:
On 02/29/2012 06:12 AM, Orjan Friberg wrote:
For the beagleboard, ecc.size is not explicitly set when doing 'nandecc sw'. If it's not set for the NAND_ECC_SOFT case in nand_scan_tail, it's set to 256 bytes.
When doing 'nandecc hw', ecc.size is set to 512 bytes. Hence, when changing back to 'nandecc sw' ecc.size remains at 512 bytes and suddenly the format has changed.
It seems the current nandecc command needs to set this explicitly, but also needs to be augmented to be able to select the newly added 4/8-bit BCH ECC.
Yes, that looks like a bug in omap_nand_switch_ecc().
Correct. And wrt using the new 4/8/16-bit BCH library, that's what I was starting on when I found the nand dump issue :)
But it also seems like nandecc selection should be more generic than for omap3 (currently it lives in arch/arm/cpu/armv7/omap3/board.c).
ECC mode is normally not something that you want to be runtime switchable, as changing it usually changes the on-flash format. It also requires driver cooperation -- the actual implementation (as opposed to the command-line wrapper) is in drivers/mtd/nand/omap_gpmc.c.
There is unfortunately a long-running saga here and what we have now is what we have for a number of existing platforms. Moving forward, things are better and there's an argument at least for not making ECC mode switching a run-time command.
participants (3)
-
Orjan Friberg -
Scott Wood -
Tom Rini