duplicate DoC millenium with dd

[Nikolai Vladychevski]

David Woodhouse writes: 

> 
> niko at isl.net.mx said:
>>  yes, this is the problem... right now I'm leaving 1 Meg for the
>> linuxBIOS  and kernel and right now there is left as little as 40 K
>> bytes free space of  that meg. 
> 
> Use modules?

yes, I do, but it still big, its a 2.4.7 

>  
> 
>>  If I update the  software on the chip once a week (it's an automatic
>> update via remote  server), will it survive for 2 years without
>> errors, for example ?  
> 
> It doesn't degrade over time. Using it the first time may lose the 
> bad-block information which is put on it by the NAND flash chip 
> manufacturer (Toshiba or Samsung, not M-Systems). After that there's no 
> difference. 
> 
>>  Wow! that sounds cool! I have to try it, but would linuxBIOS conflict
>> with  it?  
> 
> No, should be fine. You could have it appear as three MTD devices - one for 
> LinuxBIOS, one for the kernel, and one for cramfs.

I'm sorry, I can't find any docs about creating partitions, mtd0, mtd1, 
mtd2, etc..? list archives dont help either, how it is done? 


>
> Using cramfs directly on the NAND flash gives you no error correction and 

but wait a minute, if I enable these options: 

   <*> NAND Device support
     [*] Enable ECC correction algorithm
     [*] Verify NAND page writes 

won't it help me? 

> no facility to work around bad blocks. I wouldn't wan to do it like that in 
> production, although in practice it'll work unless you have a chip with bad 
> blocks.

well, my environment will be production,so I guess I'm out of luck because 
if I take your precautions: 

1) I can't use nftl_format
2) I can't use mtd partitioning because I will write directly on the NAND 
flash..... 

this is kinda bad news....... 


nikolai