mtd-utils/nandwrite: what if write fails?

[Artem Bityutskiy]

On Fri, 2006-10-27 at 15:07 +0200, Ricard Wanderlof wrote:
> I assume that the mtd block devices don't provide any bad block management 
> either? (Hm, one could imagine a device which when written to simply 
> skipped bad blocks ... ?)
Yes. I personally have never used it because it is obviously very poor
FTL and is barely usable except for testing/debugging or such.

> A torture test would be nice too, but it's not really the same thing. 
> Blocks can go bad with time, and when one actually does go bad, it has to 
> be handled at that time.

I offer you to test it. Select an eraseblock, and erase it many times in
cycle and see what happens. It may be interesting. I can send you a test
module which does this.

> Another option would be to integrate erasure into nandwrite, so that it 
> could erase blocks prior to writing them, to give a completely integrated 
> utility. Writing to a non-erased (nand) flash is rather pointless anyway 
> isn't it? Naturally, one would want to set limits for the erasure so that 
> not the whole flash would have to be erased just to write a small image.

IMO be it makes sense to write a nice image flashing utility for this
instead from scratch.

-- 
Best regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Битюцкий Артём)