We are in the progress of starting to implement u-boot and will need NAND support as well.

As it looks at the moment we will access the NAND flash not in page boundaries, but rather with arbitrary offsets. At the moment we are using something similar to the boot command with is still a adaptation from former armboot. We don't use ECC and also no FS, rather fixed addresses. However this has to change in the future, but for the moment we are just prototyping. AS or the bad block cheeking, I would rather go for the relocation implementation rather than the erasing the complete chip.

I am looking forward to see how your work progresses and might commit to it in the future as well if I can.

greetings Peter Billek Board Level Design, Realtime SW Local Design Center VIE Ericsson Enterprise GmbH mailto:peter.billek@ericsson.com

-----Original Message----- From: u-boot-users-admin@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:u-boot-users-admin@lists.sourceforge.net]On Behalf Of Pantelis Antoniou Sent: Dienstag, 27. April 2004 09:08 To: Wolfgang Denk; U-Boot Users Subject: [U-Boot-Users] [RFC] NAND Flash

Hello there.

As you remember earlier I have sent a small patch for the NAND portion of u-boot.

This forced me to really take a hard look at the code and really evaluate it.

The big problem with the code as it is its its tendancy not to account properly for errors which are not only probable but certain during the life of the device.

For example the current code cannot boot reliably from NAND and the read and write routines are also unreliable.

It's basic assumption made that you can read/write from the NAND at any position is false. This is impossible because of the bad blocks that may force you to skip a bad sector.

I'm currently in the process of rewritting to actually make it work reliably.

I can keep backwards compatibility with the old code but you can only use it at your own risk.

I'm asking for any people currently working with NAND to comment on the following points:

1. Do you read and write the NAND at arbitrary offsets? That means not in page boundaries.

2. Do you use the NAND boot command? It can be replaced by a copy and bootm sequence.

3. Do you use it as a raw device without employing ECC? Do you understand the implications?

4. What kind of filesystem do you use? JFFS2 & YAFS have different OOB placement of ECC and status bits?

5. What kind of bad block management options would you like? I'm thinking of implementing a bad block detection mechanism which would erase and test the whole chip for any bad blocks. Another command could also utilise ECC to detect borderline working pages and relocate them to avoid a permanent failure.

Awaiting your input...

Regards

Pantelis

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