Hello, booters - and Happy New Year!

I am looking for a bit of advice on a seemingly messy problem. Our PXA-255 board uses the K3-type Intel Strataflash chips, the kind you have to "unlock before you can erase". If I do a "protect off all" in u-boot BEFORE I boot my kernel, my target board boots the kernel correctly, and is able to mount its JFFS2 root filesystem. If I DON'T do "protect off all", the boot fails because Linux cannot write to the JFFS2 - because my kernel does not currently "unlock" before it tries to erase...

I put an "unlock before erase" fix into my u-boot port - that's why it works correctly. The question is - What is the best way to deal with this in the Linux kernel? Is there some "correct" and/or straightforward way to accomplish this??

Thanks in advance, craig vanderborgh voxware incorporated