pxa3xx_nand times out in 4.14 with JFFS2

[Ezequiel Garcia]

On 17 December 2017 at 12:00, Willy Tarreau <w at 1wt.eu> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 03:53:05PM +0100, Boris Brezillon wrote:
>> On Sun, 17 Dec 2017 11:27:51 -0300
>> Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel at vanguardiasur.com.ar> wrote:
>>
>> > On 17 December 2017 at 09:05, Willy Tarreau <w at 1wt.eu> wrote:
>> > > Hello,
>> > >
>> > > I recently bought a Linksys WRT1900ACS which hosts an Armada 385 and a
>> > > NAND flash. While I could get OpenWRT to work flawlessly on it using
>> > > kernel 4.4, mainline 4.14.6 fails with a lot of such messages :
>> > >
>> > >     pxa3xx-nand f10d0000.flash: Wait time out!!!
>> > >
>> >
>> > Boris,
>> >
>> > Any idea why this issue is on v4.14, but not observed on v4.4?
>>
>> I have absolutely no idea.
>
> Warning, the 4.4 in openwrt very likely is heavily patched! That's also
> why I'm moving to mainline instead (to know what I'm using). I've seen
> some nand timeout changes in the patches. I don't know if anything else
> is applied to the driver (it's always a pain to find where to dig, as
> there is no unified list of all patches for a given architecture).
>
>> > Also, is this somehow related to Armada 385 only?
>>
>> I doubt it. My guess is that almost nobody uses JFFS2 these days, which
>> may explain why this problem has not been detected before.
>
> That's very likely indeed.
>
> Ezequiel, to answer your question about dumping bad blocks, this flash
> doesn't report any bad blocks yet (cool) however I could issue "nanddump
> --oob --bb=dumpbad" on all MTD devices without issues. The last one has
> 8 BBT blocks. I didn't find any bad block, but I could confirm that
> dumping oob apparently worked as it returned data that differs from the
> non-oob dump on the last partition (the one containing the oob blocks),
> so I guess we're fine :
>

If not too much to ask, this is the test that I believe is needed.
You seem to have a setup ready, hence why I'm asking you, if
possible, to give it a shot.

(1) Scrub the BBT from the NAND. Or scrub the whole NAND.
You cannot do this from the kernel, it needs to be done from the bootloader.

(2) Mark a couple blocks as bad using the OOB -- AFAICR, there
was a command to do this in the bootloader.

(3) Boot, let Linux create the BBT and see if it catches the bad blocks.

This would guarantee that devices with factory bad blocks,
(and no BBT), would be OK with this patch.
-- 
Ezequiel García, VanguardiaSur
www.vanguardiasur.com.ar