Commit Graph

47 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Artem Bityutskiy
815bc5f8fe UBI: fix multiple spelling typos
Some of the typos were indicated by Adrian Hunter,
some by 'aspell'.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-06-10 16:13:27 +03:00
Dmitry Pervushin
518ceef0c9 UBI: remove built-in gluebi
Remove built-in gluebi support. This is a preparation for a
standalone glubi module support

Signed-off-by: Dmitry Pervushin <dpervushin@embeddedalley.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-06-02 13:53:35 +03:00
Dmitry Pervushin
0e0ee1cc33 UBI: add notification API
UBI volume notifications are intended to create the API to get clients
notified about volume creation/deletion, renaming and re-sizing. A
client can subscribe to these notifications using 'ubi_volume_register()'
and cancel the subscription using 'ubi_volume_unregister()'. When UBI
volumes change, a blocking notifier is called. Clients also can request
"added" events on all volumes that existed before client subscribed
to the notifications.

If we use notifications instead of calling functions like 'ubi_gluebi_xxx()',
we can make the MTD emulation layer to be more flexible: build it as a
separate module and load/unload it on demand.

[Artem: many cleanups, rework locking, add "updated" event, provide
 device/volume info in notifiers]

Signed-off-by: Dmitry Pervushin <dpervushin@embeddedalley.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-06-02 13:53:35 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
b86a2c56e5 UBI: do not switch to R/O mode on read errors
This patch improves UBI errors handling. ATM UBI switches to
R/O mode when the WL worker fails to read the source PEB.
This means that the upper layers (e.g., UBIFS) has no
chances to unmap the erroneous PEB and fix the error.
This patch changes this behaviour and makes UBI put PEBs
like this into a separate RB-tree, thus preventing the
WL worker from hitting the same read errors again and
again.

But there is a 10% limit on a maximum amount of PEBs like this.
If there are too much of them, UBI switches to R/O mode.

Additionally, this patch teaches UBI not to panic and
switch to R/O mode if after a PEB has been copied, the
target LEB cannot be read back. Instead, now UBI cancels
the operation and schedules the target PEB for torturing.

The error paths has been tested by ingecting errors
into 'ubi_eba_copy_leb()'.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-06-02 13:53:35 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
90bf0265e5 UBI: introduce new constants
This patch is a clean-up and a preparation for the following
patches. It introduece constants for the return values of the
'ubi_eba_copy_leb()' function.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-06-02 13:53:35 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
2cb81e218f UBI: small debugging code optimization
The @ubi->dbg_peb_buf is needed only when paranoid checks are
enabled, not when debugging in general is enabled.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-05-18 12:28:25 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
f089c0b28c UBI: re-name volumes_mutex to device_mutex
The mutex essencially protects the entire UBI device, so the
old @volumes_mutex name is a little misleading.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-05-18 12:28:24 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
383d08e045 UBI: remove redundant mutex
The @mult_mutex does not serve any purpose. We already have
@volumes_mutex and it is enough. The @volume mutex is pushed
down to the 'ubi_rename_volumes()', because we want first
to open all volumes in the exclusive mode, and then lock the
mutex, just like all other ioctl's (remove, re-size, etc) do.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-05-18 12:26:41 +03:00
Sidney Amani
766fb95ba0 UBI: allow direct user-space I/O
Introduce a new ioctl UBI_IOCSETPROP to set properties
on a volume. Also add the first property:
UBI_PROP_DIRECT_WRITE, this property is used to set the
ability to use direct writes in userspace

Signed-off-by: Sidney Amani <seed@uffs.org>
Signed-off-by: Corentin Chary <corentincj@iksaif.net>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-01-27 16:54:41 +02:00
Jan Engelhardt
4d187a88d3 UBI: constify file operations
Signed-off-by: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@medozas.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-01-18 14:02:08 +02:00
Xiaochuan-Xu
7b6c32daec UBI: simplify PEB protection code
UBI has 2 RB-trees to implement PEB protection, which is too
much for simply prevent PEB from being moved for some time.
This patch implements this using lists. The benefits:

1. No need to allocate protection entry on each PEB get.
2. No need to maintain balanced trees and walk them.

Signed-off-by: Xiaochuan-Xu <xiaochuan-xu@cqu.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-12-16 10:09:58 +02:00
Xiaochuan-Xu
23553b2c08 UBI: prepare for protection tree improvements
This patch modifies @struct ubi_wl_entry and adds union which
contains only one element so far. This is just a preparation
for further changes which will kill the protection tree and
make UBI use a list instead.

Signed-off-by: Xiaochuan-Xu <xiaochuan-xu@cqu.edu.cn>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-12-15 19:34:50 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
ebaaf1af3e UBI: fix kernel-doc errors and warnings
No functional changes, just tweak comments to make kernel-doc
work fine and stop complaining.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:36:09 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
9c9ec14770 UBI: fix checkpatch.pl errors and warnings
Just out or curiousity ran checkpatch.pl for whole UBI,
and discovered there are quite a few of stylistic issues.
Fix them.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:36:09 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
f40ac9cdf6 UBI: implement multiple volumes rename
Quite useful ioctl which allows to make atomic system upgrades.
The idea belongs to Richard Titmuss <richard_titmuss@logitech.com>

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:34:46 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
85c6e6e282 UBI: amend commentaries
Hch asked not to use "unit" for sub-systems, let it be so.
Also some other commentaries modifications.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:32:56 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
abc5e92262 UBI: fix memory leak
ubi_free_volume() function sets ubi->volumes[] to NULL, so
ubi_eba_close() is useless, it does not free what has to be freed.
So zap it and free vol->eba_tbl at the volume release function.

Pointed-out-by: Adrian Hunter <ext-adrian.hunter@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:32:54 +03:00
David Woodhouse
e43fe686e4 Merge git://git.infradead.org/~dedekind/ubi-2.6 2008-04-23 09:57:25 +01:00
Harvey Harrison
cb53b3b999 [MTD] replace remaining __FUNCTION__ occurrences
__FUNCTION__ is gcc-specific, use __func__

Signed-off-by: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
2008-04-22 12:36:04 +01:00
Artem Bityutskiy
92a74f1c1c UBI: make ubi-header.h local
The new trend in linux is not to store headers which define
on-media format in the include/ directory, but instead, store
them locally. This is because these headers "do not define any
kernel<->userspace interface".

Do so for UBI as well.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-04-17 11:31:58 +03:00
Harvey Harrison
8eee9f100b UBI: fix sparse errors in ubi.h
In C, signed 1-bit bitfields can only take the values 0 and -1, only 0 and 1
are ever assigned in current code.  Make them unsigned bitfields.

Fixes the (repeated) sparse errors:
drivers/mtd/ubi/ubi.h:220:15: error: dubious one-bit signed bitfield
drivers/mtd/ubi/ubi.h:221:17: error: dubious one-bit signed bitfield
drivers/mtd/ubi/ubi.h:222:18: error: dubious one-bit signed bitfield
drivers/mtd/ubi/ubi.h:223:16: error: dubious one-bit signed bitfield
drivers/mtd/ubi/ubi.h:224:20: error: dubious one-bit signed bitfield

Signed-off-by: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com>
Cc: Artem Bityutskiy <dedekind@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-03-04 11:02:50 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
e653879c26 UBI: implement atomic LEB change ioctl
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:26 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
1b68d0eea5 UBI: simplify internal interfaces
Instead of passing vol_id to all functions and then find
struct ubi_volume, pass struct ubi_volume pointer.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:25 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
4ccf8cffa9 UBI: add auto-resize feature
The problem: NAND flashes have different amount of initial bad physical
eraseblocks (marked as bad by the manufacturer). For example, for 256MiB
Samsung OneNAND flash there might be from 0 to 40 bad initial eraseblocks,
which is about 2%. When UBI is used as the base system, one needs to know
the exact amount of good physical eraseblocks, because this number is
needed to create the UBI image which is put to the devices during
production. But this number is not know, which forces us to use the
minimum number of good physical eraseblocks. And UBI additionally
reserves some percentage of physical eraseblocks for bad block handling
(default is 1%), so we have 1-3% of PEBs reserved at the end, depending
on the amount of initial bad PEBs. But it is desired to always have
1% (or more, depending on the configuration).

Solution: this patch adds an "auto-resize" flag to the volume table.
The volume which has the "auto-resize" flag will automatically be re-sized
(enlarged) on the first UBI initialization. UBI clears the flag when
the volume is re-sized. Only one volume may have the "auto-resize" flag.

So, the production UBI image may have one volume with "auto-resize"
flag set, and its size is automatically adjusted on the first boot
of the device.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:24 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
896c0c06aa UBI: use bit-fields
Save 12 bytes of RAM per volume by using bit-fields instead of integers.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:24 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
b9a06623d9 UBI: get rid of ubi_ltree_slab
This slab cache is not really needed since the number of objects
is low and the constructor does not make much sense because we
allocate oblects when doint I/O, which is way slower then allocation.

Suggested-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:24 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
783b273afa UBI: use separate mutex for volumes checking
Introduce a separate mutex which serializes volumes checking,
because we cammot really use volumes_mutex - it cases reverse
locking problems with mtd_tbl_mutex when gluebi is used -
thanks to lockdep.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
897a316c9e UBI: handle attach ioctl
Actually implement the MTD device attach/detach handlers.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
dd38fccfbc UBI: remove data_offset
'data_offset' parameter does not really make sense and it is not
needed. Get rid of it.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
cdfa788acd UBI: prepare attach and detach functions
Prepare the attach and detach functions to by used outside of
module initialization:

* detach function checks reference count before detaching
* it kills the background thread as well

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
e73f4459d9 UBI: add UBI devices reference counting
This is one more step on the way to "removable" UBI devices. It
adds reference counting for UBI devices. Every time a volume on
this device is opened - the device's refcount is increased. It
is also increased if someone is reading any sysfs file of this
UBI device or of one of its volumes.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
9f961b5756 UBI: add UBI control device
This patch is a preparation to make UBI devices dynamic. It
adds an UBI control device which has dynamically allocated
major number and registers itself as "ubi_ctrl". It does not
do anything so far. The idea is that this device will allow
to attach/detach MTD devices from userspace.

This is symilar to what the Linux device mapper has.

The next things to do are:
* Fix UBI, because it now assumes UBI devices cannot go away
* Implement control device ioctls which will attach/detach MTD
  devices

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:17 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
593dd33c92 UBI: fix ubi_wl_flush
The flush function should finish all the pending jobs. But if
somebody else is doing a work, this function should wait and let
it finish.

This patche uses rw semaphore for synchronization purpose - it
just looks quite convinient.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:16 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
43f9b25a9c UBI: bugfix: protect from volume removal
When the WL worker is moving an LEB, the volume might go away
occasionally. UBI does not handle these situations correctly.

This patch introduces a new mutex which serializes wear-levelling
worker and the the 'ubi_wl_put_peb()' function. Now, if one puts
an LEB, and its PEB is being moved, it will wait on the mutex.
And because we unmap all LEBs when removing volumes, this will make
the volume remove function to wait while the LEB movement
finishes.

Below is an example of an oops which should be fixed by this patch:

Pid: 9167, comm: io_paral Not tainted (2.6.24-rc5-ubi-2.6.git #2)
EIP: 0060:[<f884a379>] EFLAGS: 00010246 CPU: 0
EIP is at prot_tree_del+0x2a/0x63 [ubi]
EAX: f39a90e0 EBX: 00000000 ECX: 00000000 EDX: 00000134
ESI: f39a90e0 EDI: f39a90e0 EBP: f2d55ddc ESP: f2d55dd4
 DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 00d8 GS: 0033 SS: 0068
Process io_paral (pid: 9167, ti=f2d54000 task=f72a8030 task.ti=f2d54000)
Stack: f39a95f8 ef6aae50 f2d55e08 f884a511 f88538e1 f884ecea 00000134 00000000
       f39a9604 f39a95f0 efea8280 00000000 f39a90e0 f2d55e40 f8847261 f8850c3c
       f884eaad 00000001 000000b9 00000134 00000172 000000b9 00000134 00000001
Call Trace:
 [<c0105227>] show_trace_log_lvl+0x1a/0x30
 [<c01052e2>] show_stack_log_lvl+0xa5/0xca
 [<c01053d6>] show_registers+0xcf/0x21b
 [<c0105648>] die+0x126/0x224
 [<c0119a62>] do_page_fault+0x27f/0x60d
 [<c037dd62>] error_code+0x72/0x78
 [<f884a511>] ubi_wl_put_peb+0xf0/0x191 [ubi]
 [<f8847261>] ubi_eba_unmap_leb+0xaf/0xcc [ubi]
 [<f8843c21>] ubi_remove_volume+0x102/0x1e8 [ubi]
 [<f8846077>] ubi_cdev_ioctl+0x22a/0x383 [ubi]
 [<c017d768>] do_ioctl+0x68/0x71
 [<c017d7c6>] vfs_ioctl+0x55/0x271
 [<c017da15>] sys_ioctl+0x33/0x52
 [<c0104152>] sysenter_past_esp+0x5f/0xa5
 =======================

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:16 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
d05c77a816 UBI: introduce volume refcounting
Add ref_count field to UBI volumes and remove weired "vol->removed"
field. This way things are better understandable and we do not have
to do whold show_attr operation under spinlock.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:16 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
cae0a77125 UBI: tweak volumes locking
Transform vtbl_mutex to volumes_mutex - this just makes code
easier to understand.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:15 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
89b96b6929 UBI: improve internal interfaces
Pass volume description object to the EBA function which makes
more sense, and EBA function do not have to find the volume
description object by volume ID.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:15 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
b96bf4c33d UBI: remove ubi_devices_cnt
This global variablea is not really needed, remove it

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:15 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
06b68ba156 UBI: create ubi_wl_entry slab on initialization
Similarly to ltree_entry_slab, it makes more sense to create
and destroy ubi_wl_entry slab on module initialization/exit.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:14 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
3a8d464286 UBI: create ltree_entry slab on initialization
Since the ltree_entry slab cache is a global entity, which is
used by all UBI devices, it is more logical to create it on
module initialization time and destro on module exit time.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:14 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
49dfc29928 UBI: remove redundant field
Remove redundant ubi->major field - we have it in ubi->cdev.dev
already.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-12-26 19:15:14 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
e8823bd63d UBI: fix atomic LEB change problems
When the UBI device is nearly full, i.e. all LEBs are mapped, we have
only one spare LEB left - the one we reserved for WL purposes. Well,
I do not count the LEBs which were reserved for bad PEB handling -
suppose NOR flash for simplicity. If an "atomic LEB change operation"
is run, and the WL unit is moving a LEB, we have no spare LEBs to
finish the operation and fail, which is not good. Moreover, if there
are 2 or more simultanious "atomic LEB change" requests, only one of
them has chances to succeed, the other will fail with -ENOSPC. Not
good either.

This patch does 2 things:
1. Reserves one PEB for the "atomic LEB change" operation.
2. Serealize the operations so that only on of them may run
   at a time (by means of a mutex).

Pointed-to-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:21 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
e88d6e10e5 UBI: do not use vmalloc on I/O path
Similar reason as in case of the previous patch: it causes
deadlocks if a filesystem with writeback support works on top
of UBI. So pre-allocate needed buffers when attaching MTD device.
We also need mutexes to protect the buffers, but they do not
cause much contantion because they are used in recovery, torture,
and WL copy routines, which are called seldom.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:21 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
33818bbb84 UBI: allocate memory with GFP_NOFS
Use GFP_NOFS flag when allocating memory on I/O path, because otherwise
we may deadlock the filesystem which works on top of us. We observed
the deadlocks with UBIFS. Example:

VFS->FS lock a lock->UBI->kmalloc()->VFS writeback->FS locks the same
lock again.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:20 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
92ad8f3750 UBI: use vmalloc for large buffers
UBI allocates temporary buffers of PEB size, which may be 256KiB.
Use vmalloc instead of kmalloc for such big temporary buffers.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:53:08 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
941dfb07ed UBI: set correct gluebi device size
In case of static volumes, make emulated MTD device size to
be equivalent to data size, rather then volume size.

Reported-by: John Smith <john@arrows.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:52:51 +03:00
Artem B. Bityutskiy
801c135ce7 UBI: Unsorted Block Images
UBI (Latin: "where?") manages multiple logical volumes on a single
flash device, specifically supporting NAND flash devices. UBI provides
a flexible partitioning concept which still allows for wear-levelling
across the whole flash device.

In a sense, UBI may be compared to the Logical Volume Manager
(LVM). Whereas LVM maps logical sector numbers to physical HDD sector
numbers, UBI maps logical eraseblocks to physical eraseblocks.

More information may be found at
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html

Partitioning/Re-partitioning

  An UBI volume occupies a certain number of erase blocks. This is
  limited by a configured maximum volume size, which could also be
  viewed as the partition size. Each individual UBI volume's size can
  be changed independently of the other UBI volumes, provided that the
  sum of all volume sizes doesn't exceed a certain limit.

  UBI supports dynamic volumes and static volumes. Static volumes are
  read-only and their contents are protected by CRC check sums.

Bad eraseblocks handling

  UBI transparently handles bad eraseblocks. When a physical
  eraseblock becomes bad, it is substituted by a good physical
  eraseblock, and the user does not even notice this.

Scrubbing

  On a NAND flash bit flips can occur on any write operation,
  sometimes also on read. If bit flips persist on the device, at first
  they can still be corrected by ECC, but once they accumulate,
  correction will become impossible. Thus it is best to actively scrub
  the affected eraseblock, by first copying it to a free eraseblock
  and then erasing the original. The UBI layer performs this type of
  scrubbing under the covers, transparently to the UBI volume users.

Erase Counts

  UBI maintains an erase count header per eraseblock. This frees
  higher-level layers (like file systems) from doing this and allows
  for centralized erase count management instead. The erase counts are
  used by the wear-levelling algorithm in the UBI layer. The algorithm
  itself is exchangeable.

Booting from NAND

  For booting directly from NAND flash the hardware must at least be
  capable of fetching and executing a small portion of the NAND
  flash. Some NAND flash controllers have this kind of support. They
  usually limit the window to a few kilobytes in erase block 0. This
  "initial program loader" (IPL) must then contain sufficient logic to
  load and execute the next boot phase.

  Due to bad eraseblocks, which may be randomly scattered over the
  flash device, it is problematic to store the "secondary program
  loader" (SPL) statically. Also, due to bit-flips it may become
  corrupted over time. UBI allows to solve this problem gracefully by
  storing the SPL in a small static UBI volume.

UBI volumes vs. static partitions

  UBI volumes are still very similar to static MTD partitions:

    * both consist of eraseblocks (logical eraseblocks in case of UBI
      volumes, and physical eraseblocks in case of static partitions;
    * both support three basic operations - read, write, erase.

  But UBI volumes have the following advantages over traditional
  static MTD partitions:

    * there are no eraseblock wear-leveling constraints in case of UBI
      volumes, so the user should not care about this;
    * there are no bit-flips and bad eraseblocks in case of UBI volumes.

  So, UBI volumes may be considered as flash devices with relaxed
  restrictions.

Where can it be found?

  Documentation, kernel code and applications can be found in the MTD
  gits.

What are the applications for?

  The applications help to create binary flash images for two purposes: pfi
  files (partial flash images) for in-system update of UBI volumes, and plain
  binary images, with or without OOB data in case of NAND, for a manufacturing
  step. Furthermore some tools are/and will be created that allow flash content
  analysis after a system has crashed..

Who did UBI?

  The original ideas, where UBI is based on, were developed by Andreas
  Arnez, Frank Haverkamp and Thomas Gleixner. Josh W. Boyer and some others
  were involved too. The implementation of the kernel layer was done by Artem
  B. Bityutskiy. The user-space applications and tools were written by Oliver
  Lohmann with contributions from Frank Haverkamp, Andreas Arnez, and Artem.
  Joern Engel contributed a patch which modifies JFFS2 so that it can be run on
  a UBI volume. Thomas Gleixner did modifications to the NAND layer. Alexander
  Schmidt made some testing work as well as core functionality improvements.

Signed-off-by: Artem B. Bityutskiy <dedekind@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Frank Haverkamp <haver@vnet.ibm.com>
2007-04-27 14:23:33 +03:00