[LEDE-DEV] [PATCH] base-files: seed /dev/urandom

[David Lang]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2016, Daniel Curran-Dickinson wrote:

> On Mon, 2016-06-13 at 22:10 +0200, Etienne Champetier wrote:
>
>> Before we try to minimize writes, how much writes are we talking about?
>> my openwrt routers have multiple months of uptime, and even if we get
>> down to 1 week, that gets us to 53 writes a year.
>> How much writes can a flash handle these days?
>
> I'm told that even cheap wear-levelling and flash chips from 4-5 years
> ago with even 4 MB flash that it's really non-issue (and done the math
> for what would be the case if wear levelling worked as claimed, on all
> blocks, not just currently unwritten; the real question is whether
> wear-levelling works as claimed, or more to the point whether there is
> any *hard data* that says wear levelling does *not* work as claimed, or
> whether persistent anecdotal stories of worn out flash are based on
> urban legends, or classic mis-attribution).

Well, we don't have a layer that will implement wear leveling in OpenWRT/LEDE do 
we? We use the raw flash and the filesystem, so unless the filesystem is moving 
directories they will be hot spots.

But even in that case, aren't we talking hundreds of thousands to millions of 
writes before there is a problem?

David Lang