Commit Graph

26 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Sergey Senozhatsky
8f7d282c71 zram: deprecate zram attrs sysfs nodes
Add Documentation/ABI/obsolete/sysfs-block-zram file and list obsolete and
deprecated attributes there.  The patch also adds additional information
to zram documentation and describes the basic strategy:

- the existing RW nodes will be downgraded to WO nodes (in 4.11)
- deprecated RO sysfs nodes will eventually be removed (in 4.11)

Users will be additionally notified about deprecated attr usage by
pr_warn_once() (added to every deprecated attr _show()), as suggested by
Minchan Kim.

User space is advised to use zram<id>/stat, zram<id>/io_stat and
zram<id>/mm_stat files.

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-04-15 16:35:21 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
4f2109f608 zram: export new 'mm_stat' sysfs attrs
Per-device `zram<id>/mm_stat' file provides mm statistics of a particular
zram device in a format similar to block layer statistics.  The file
consists of a single line and represents the following stats (separated by
whitespace):

        orig_data_size
        compr_data_size
        mem_used_total
        mem_limit
        mem_used_max
        zero_pages
        num_migrated

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-04-15 16:35:21 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
2f6a3bed73 zram: export new 'io_stat' sysfs attrs
Per-device `zram<id>/io_stat' file provides accumulated I/O statistics of
particular zram device in a format similar to block layer statistics.  The
file consists of a single line and represents the following stats
(separated by whitespace):

        failed_reads
        failed_writes
        invalid_io
        notify_free

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-04-15 16:35:21 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
77ba015f9d zram: describe device attrs in documentation
Briefly describe exported device stat attrs in zram documentation.  We
will eventually get rid of per-stat sysfs nodes and, thus, clean up
Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block-zram file, which is the only source
of information about device sysfs nodes.

Add `num_migrated' description, since there is no independent
`num_migrated' sysfs node (and no corresponding sysfs-block-zram entry),
it will be exported via zram<id>/mm_stat file.

At this point we can provide minimal description, because sysfs-block-zram
still contains detailed information.

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-04-15 16:35:21 -07:00
Minchan Kim
461a8eee6a zram: report maximum used memory
Normally, zram user could get maximum memory usage zram consumed via
polling mem_used_total with sysfs in userspace.

But it has a critical problem because user can miss peak memory usage
during update inverval of polling.  For avoiding that, user should poll it
with shorter interval(ie, 0.0000000001s) with mlocking to avoid page fault
delay when memory pressure is heavy.  It would be troublesome.

This patch adds new knob "mem_used_max" so user could see the maximum
memory usage easily via reading the knob and reset it via "echo 0 >
/sys/block/zram0/mem_used_max".

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: <juno.choi@lge.com>
Cc: <seungho1.park@lge.com>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjennings@variantweb.net>
Reviewed-by: David Horner <ds2horner@gmail.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-10-09 22:26:02 -04:00
Minchan Kim
9ada9da957 zram: zram memory size limitation
Since zram has no control feature to limit memory usage, it makes hard to
manage system memrory.

This patch adds new knob "mem_limit" via sysfs to set up the a limit so
that zram could fail allocation once it reaches the limit.

In addition, user could change the limit in runtime so that he could
manage the memory more dynamically.

Initial state is no limit so it doesn't break old behavior.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix typo, per Sergey]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: <juno.choi@lge.com>
Cc: <seungho1.park@lge.com>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjennings@variantweb.net>
Cc: David Horner <ds2horner@gmail.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-10-09 22:26:02 -04:00
Minchan Kim
60a726e333 zram: propagate error to user
When we initialized zcomp with single, we couldn't change
max_comp_streams without zram reset but current interface doesn't show
any error to user and even it changes max_comp_streams's value without
any effect so it would make user very confusing.

This patch prevents max_comp_streams's change when zcomp was initialized
as single zcomp and emit the error to user(ex, echo).

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: don't return with the lock held, per Sergey]
[fengguang.wu@intel.com: fix coccinelle warnings]
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
Cc: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-04-07 16:36:02 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
e46b8a030d zram: make compression algorithm selection possible
Add and document `comp_algorithm' device attribute.  This attribute allows
to show supported compression and currently selected compression
algorithms:

	cat /sys/block/zram0/comp_algorithm
	[lzo] lz4

and change selected compression algorithm:
	echo lzo > /sys/block/zram0/comp_algorithm

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-04-07 16:36:01 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
beca3ec71f zram: add multi stream functionality
Existing zram (zcomp) implementation has only one compression stream
(buffer and algorithm private part), so in order to prevent data
corruption only one write (compress operation) can use this compression
stream, forcing all concurrent write operations to wait for stream lock
to be released.  This patch changes zcomp to keep a compression streams
list of user-defined size (via sysfs device attr).  Each write operation
still exclusively holds compression stream, the difference is that we
can have N write operations (depending on size of streams list)
executing in parallel.  See TEST section later in commit message for
performance data.

Introduce struct zcomp_strm_multi and a set of functions to manage
zcomp_strm stream access.  zcomp_strm_multi has a list of idle
zcomp_strm structs, spinlock to protect idle list and wait queue, making
it possible to perform parallel compressions.

The following set of functions added:
- zcomp_strm_multi_find()/zcomp_strm_multi_release()
  find and release a compression stream, implement required locking
- zcomp_strm_multi_create()/zcomp_strm_multi_destroy()
  create and destroy zcomp_strm_multi

zcomp ->strm_find() and ->strm_release() callbacks are set during
initialisation to zcomp_strm_multi_find()/zcomp_strm_multi_release()
correspondingly.

Each time zcomp issues a zcomp_strm_multi_find() call, the following set
of operations performed:

- spin lock strm_lock
- if idle list is not empty, remove zcomp_strm from idle list, spin
  unlock and return zcomp stream pointer to caller
- if idle list is empty, current adds itself to wait queue. it will be
  awaken by zcomp_strm_multi_release() caller.

zcomp_strm_multi_release():
- spin lock strm_lock
- add zcomp stream to idle list
- spin unlock, wake up sleeper

Minchan Kim reported that spinlock-based locking scheme has demonstrated
a severe perfomance regression for single compression stream case,
comparing to mutex-based (see https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/2/18/16)

base                      spinlock                    mutex

==Initial write           ==Initial write             ==Initial  write
records:  5               records:  5                 records:   5
avg:      1642424.35      avg:      699610.40         avg:       1655583.71
std:      39890.95(2.43%) std:      232014.19(33.16%) std:       52293.96
max:      1690170.94      max:      1163473.45        max:       1697164.75
min:      1568669.52      min:      573429.88         min:       1553410.23
==Rewrite                 ==Rewrite                   ==Rewrite
records:  5               records:  5                 records:   5
avg:      1611775.39      avg:      501406.64         avg:       1684419.11
std:      17144.58(1.06%) std:      15354.41(3.06%)   std:       18367.42
max:      1641800.95      max:      531356.78         max:       1706445.84
min:      1593515.27      min:      488817.78         min:       1655335.73

When only one compression stream available, mutex with spin on owner
tends to perform much better than frequent wait_event()/wake_up().  This
is why single stream implemented as a special case with mutex locking.

Introduce and document zram device attribute max_comp_streams.  This
attr shows and stores current zcomp's max number of zcomp streams
(max_strm).  Extend zcomp's zcomp_create() with `max_strm' parameter.
`max_strm' limits the number of zcomp_strm structs in compression
backend's idle list (max_comp_streams).

max_comp_streams used during initialisation as follows:
-- passing to zcomp_create() max_strm equals to 1 will initialise zcomp
using single compression stream zcomp_strm_single (mutex-based locking).
-- passing to zcomp_create() max_strm greater than 1 will initialise zcomp
using multi compression stream zcomp_strm_multi (spinlock-based locking).

default max_comp_streams value is 1, meaning that zram with single stream
will be initialised.

Later patch will introduce configuration knob to change max_comp_streams
on already initialised and used zcomp.

TEST
iozone -t 3 -R -r 16K -s 60M -I +Z

       test           base       1 strm (mutex)     3 strm (spinlock)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Initial write      589286.78       583518.39          718011.05
       Rewrite      604837.97       596776.38         1515125.72
  Random write      584120.11       595714.58         1388850.25
        Pwrite      535731.17       541117.38          739295.27
        Fwrite     1418083.88      1478612.72         1484927.06

Usage example:
set max_comp_streams to 4
        echo 4 > /sys/block/zram0/max_comp_streams

show current max_comp_streams (default value is 1).
        cat /sys/block/zram0/max_comp_streams

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-04-07 16:36:01 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
8dd1d3247e zram: document failed_reads, failed_writes stats
Document `failed_reads' and `failed_writes' device attributes.
Remove info about `discard' - there is no such zram attr.

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-04-07 16:36:00 -07:00
Sergey Senozhatsky
e64cd51d2f zram: move zram size warning to documentation
Move zram warning about disksize and size of memory correlation to zram
documentation.

Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-04-07 16:36:00 -07:00
Andreas Gruenbacher
d81dc4f45b drbd: Describe the future high-level structure of DRBD
The following commits will successively transform DRBD into the structure
described here.

Signed-off-by: Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@linbit.com>
2014-02-17 16:27:48 +01:00
Minchan Kim
49061236a9 zram: remove old private project comment
Remove the old private compcache project address so upcoming patches
should be sent to LKML because we Linux kernel community will take care.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-01-30 16:56:55 -08:00
Minchan Kim
cd67e10ac6 zram: promote zram from staging
Zram has lived in staging for a LONG LONG time and have been
fixed/improved by many contributors so code is clean and stable now.  Of
course, there are lots of product using zram in real practice.

The major TV companys have used zram as swap since two years ago and
recently our production team released android smart phone with zram
which is used as swap, too and recently Android Kitkat start to use zram
for small memory smart phone.  And there was a report Google released
their ChromeOS with zram, too and cyanogenmod have been used zram long
time ago.  And I heard some disto have used zram block device for tmpfs.
In addition, I saw many report from many other peoples.  For example,
Lubuntu start to use it.

The benefit of zram is very clear.  With my experience, one of the
benefit was to remove jitter of video application with backgroud memory
pressure.  It would be effect of efficient memory usage by compression
but more issue is whether swap is there or not in the system.  Recent
mobile platforms have used JAVA so there are many anonymous pages.  But
embedded system normally are reluctant to use eMMC or SDCard as swap
because there is wear-leveling and latency issues so if we do not use
swap, it means we can't reclaim anoymous pages and at last, we could
encounter OOM kill.  :(

Although we have real storage as swap, it was a problem, too.  Because
it sometime ends up making system very unresponsible caused by slow swap
storage performance.

Quote from Luigi on Google
 "Since Chrome OS was mentioned: the main reason why we don't use swap
  to a disk (rotating or SSD) is because it doesn't degrade gracefully
  and leads to a bad interactive experience.  Generally we prefer to
  manage RAM at a higher level, by transparently killing and restarting
  processes.  But we noticed that zram is fast enough to be competitive
  with the latter, and it lets us make more efficient use of the
  available RAM.  " and he announced.
http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg57717.html

Other uses case is to use zram for block device.  Zram is block device
so anyone can format the block device and mount on it so some guys on
the internet start zram as /var/tmp.
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-838198-start-0.html

Let's promote zram and enhance/maintain it instead of removing.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-01-30 16:56:55 -08:00
Fabian Frederick
f5abc8e758 Documentation/blockdev/ramdisk.txt: updates
- ramdisk_blocksize doesn't exist anymore

- Module parameters added to documentation

Signed-off-by: Fabian Frederick <fabf@skynet.be>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-01-23 16:37:01 -08:00
Ben Harris
f7cb20f03d floppy: Correct documentation of driver options when used as a module.
The options have to be passed space-separated and prefixed by "floppy=",
rather than separately and unprefixed.

This fixes <http://bugs.debian.org/726655>.

Signed-off-by: Ben Harris <bjh21@cam.ac.uk>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2013-11-08 09:10:31 -07:00
Wouter Verhelst
5e4b269bcd nbd: update documentation and link to mailinglist
Documentation/blockdev/nbd.txt contained some documentation which was
horribly outdated and probably still dates from the original patch that
added NBD support to the kernel.

This patch removes the useless and outdated bits.  The tools on nbd.sf.net
are fully documented in manpages, which is where documentation for the
non-kernel bits should live.

Additionally, add a reference to the MAINTAINERS file for the nbd-general
mailinglist that is used for discussion of the userland tools and the
kernel module already.

Signed-off-by: Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be>
Cc: Paul Clements <Paul.Clements@steeleye.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-02-27 19:10:22 -08:00
Lucas De Marchi
970e248649 Documentation: remove references to /etc/modprobe.conf
Usage of /etc/modprobe.conf file was deprecated by module-init-tools and
is no longer parsed by new kmod tool. References to this file are
replaced in Documentation, comments and Kconfig according to the
context.

There are also some references to the old /etc/modules.conf from 2.4
kernels that are being removed.

Signed-off-by: Lucas De Marchi <lucas.demarchi@profusion.mobi>
Acked-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Acked-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-03-30 16:03:15 -07:00
Stephen M. Cameron
0007a4c90a cciss: auto engage SCSI mid layer at driver load time
A long time ago, probably in 2002, one of the distros, or maybe more than
one, loaded block drivers prior to loading the SCSI mid layer.  This meant
that the cciss driver, being a block driver, could not engage the SCSI mid
layer at init time without panicking, and relied on being poked by a
userland program after the system was up (and the SCSI mid layer was
therefore present) to engage the SCSI mid layer.

This is no longer the case, and cciss can safely rely on the SCSI mid
layer being present at init time and engage the SCSI mid layer straight
away.  This means that users will see their tape drives and medium
changers at driver load time without need for a script in /etc/rc.d that
does this:

for x in /proc/driver/cciss/cciss*
do
	echo "engage scsi" > $x
done

However, if no tape drives or medium changers are detected, the SCSI mid
layer will not be engaged.  If a tape drive or medium change is later
hot-added to the system it will then be necessary to use the above script
or similar for the device(s) to be acceesible.

Signed-off-by: Stephen M. Cameron <scameron@beardog.cce.hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2011-11-16 09:21:49 +01:00
Joseph Handzik
1304953700 cciss: Adds simple mode functionality
Signed-off-by: Joseph Handzik <joseph.t.handzik@beardog.cce.hp.com>
Acked-by: Stephen M. Cameron <scameron@beardog.cce.hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2011-08-08 11:40:15 +02:00
Wanlong Gao
25eb650a69 doc: fix wrong arch/i386 references
Change all "arch/i386" to "arch/x86" in Documentaion/,
since the directory has changed.

Also update the files which have changed their filename
in the meantime accordingly.

Signed-off-by: Wanlong Gao <wanlong.gao@gmail.com>
[jkosina@suse.cz: reword changelog]
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2011-06-13 13:43:05 +02:00
Stephen M. Cameron
8a4ec67bd5 cciss: add cciss_tape_cmds module paramter
This is to allow number of commands reserved for use by SCSI tape drives
and medium changers to be adjusted at driver load time via the kernel
parameter cciss_tape_cmds, with a default value of 6, and a range
of 2 - 16 inclusive.  Previously, the driver limited the number of
commands which could be queued to the SCSI half of the the driver
to only 2.  This is to fix the problem that if you had more than
two tape drives, you couldn't, for example, erase or rewind them all
at the same time.

Signed-off-by: Stephen M. Cameron <scameron@beardog.cce.hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
2011-05-06 08:23:59 -06:00
Justin P. Mattock
0ea6e61122 Documentation: update broken web addresses.
Below you will find an updated version from the original series bunching all patches into one big patch
updating broken web addresses that are located in Documentation/*
Some of the addresses date as far far back as 1995 etc... so searching became a bit difficult,
the best way to deal with these is to use web.archive.org to locate these addresses that are outdated.
Now there are also some addresses pointing to .spec files some are located, but some(after searching
on the companies site)where still no where to be found. In this case I just changed the address
to the company site this way the users can contact the company and they can locate them for the users.

Signed-off-by: Justin P. Mattock <justinmattock@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Weber <weber@corscience.de>
Signed-off-by: Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@gmail.com>
Cc: Paulo Marques <pmarques@grupopie.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Cc: Michael Neuling <mikey@neuling.org>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2010-08-04 15:21:40 +02:00
Philipp Reisner
b411b3637f The DRBD driver
Signed-off-by: Philipp Reisner <philipp.reisner@linbit.com>
Signed-off-by: Lars Ellenberg <lars.ellenberg@linbit.com>
2009-10-01 21:17:49 +02:00
unsik Kim
3fbed4c61a mflash: initial support
This driver supports mflash IO mode for linux.

Mflash is embedded flash drive and mainly targeted mobile and consumer
electronic devices.

Internally, mflash has nand flash and other hardware logics and supports 2
different operation (ATA, IO) modes.  ATA mode doesn't need any new driver
and currently works well under standard IDE subsystem.  Actually it's one
chip SSD.  IO mode is ATA-like custom mode for the host that doesn't have
IDE interface.

Followings are brief descriptions about IO mode.
A. IO mode based on ATA protocol and uses some custom command. (read confirm,
write confirm)
B. IO mode uses SRAM bus interface.
C. IO mode supports 4kB boot area, so host can boot from mflash.

This driver is quitely similar to a standard ATA driver, but because of
following reasons it is currently seperated with ATA layer.

1. ATA layer deals standard ATA protocol.  ATA layer have many low-
   level device specific interface, but data transfer keeps ATA rule.
   But, mflash IO mode doesn't.

2. Even though currently not used in mflash driver code, mflash has
   some custom command and modes.  (nand fusing, firmware patch, etc) If
   this feature supported in linux kernel, ATA layer more altered.

3. Currently PATA platform device driver doesn't support interrupt.
   (I'm not sure) But, mflash uses interrupt (polling mode is just for
   debug).

4. mflash is somewhat under-develop product.  Even though some company
   already using mflash their own product, I think more time is needed for
   standardization of custom command and mode.  That time (maybe October)
   I will talk to with ATA people.  If they accept integration, I will
   integrate.

Signed-off-by: unsik Kim <donari75@gmail.com>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
2009-04-07 08:12:38 +02:00
Randy Dunlap
31c00fc15e Create/use more directory structure in the Documentation/ tree.
Create Documentation/blockdev/ sub-directory and populate it.
Populate the Documentation/serial/ sub-directory.
Move MSI-HOWTO.txt to Documentation/PCI/.
Move ioctl-number.txt to Documentation/ioctl/.
Update all relevant 00-INDEX files.
Update all relevant Kconfig files and source files.

Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
2008-11-14 17:28:53 +00:00