U-boot and UBI

[Nigel Hathaway]

Bernard,

> Nigel Hathaway wrote:
> > Hoping to avoid re-inventing the wheel....
> > 
> > It would seem that there are a number of people who are
independently
> > porting UBI to U-Boot.
>
> I expressed interest in doing so at the time but nothing happened
about 
> it unfortunately. I can't speak for anyone else though.
>
> Bernard.

In the short term we've found a way to get round having to UBI and hence
porting it to U-Boot (we have a NOR/NAND combination, and we've gone for
the NAND as entirely jffs2).

However, the next spin of our product will use entirely NAND flash: it
will use an SoC which has an internal ROMboot and can load U-Boot
directly from NAND flash. We will have to go to UBI then (starting
development early 2009).

I have been playing around with a board from Olimex: the SAM9-L9260 (it
has an Atmel AT91SAM9260 on it). This has a ROMboot with U-Boot in NAND
flash. The board I am using has an interesting feature: the block which
U-Boot is configured to use for storing its environment just happens to
be a bad block, so I can't change and store the U-Boot environment
parameters on it.

Either the U-Boot that comes pre-flashed into the board (v1.2.0) is
misconfigured, or that version of U-Boot has failed to take into account
the possibility of the scenario described. Either way, there would
appear to be some work to do to get U-boot up-to-date with Linux MTD
state-of-the-art.

Nigel