Nandwrite's behavior in case of write failure

[Artem Bityutskiy]

On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 19:40 -0700, Nahor wrote:
> Artem Bityutskiy wrote:
> > This is what we do in ubiformat, I think. Also, ubiformat asks the user
> > if he wants to mark the block as bad, unless the -y option was used.
> > nandwrite could do something similar.
> 
> nandwrite has the -m/--markbad option instead of -y.

OK.

> However, if the option is not set, the blocks are skipped without being
> marked. I guess nandwrite should either ask the user or fail immediately.
> Continuing seems useless.

Yes. It might as well suggest using -m/

> >> My questions are:
> >> - Why erase the block?
> > Just in case. We should be very careful with marking blocks as bad,
> > because if you do this by mistake, you may loose your device. Indeed,
> > imagine you marked 100 blocks as bad my mistake, and you do not remember
> > the block numbers. How will you know which blocks you should then
> > unmark?
> 
> Well, one could unmark all of them and run nandtest, then flog oneself and
> swear to pay more attention next time :)

The problem is that factory-marked bad blocks do not have to manifest
themselves easily. They may appear to work fine, and file later, e.g.
when the temperature is higher.

> More seriously, in my case, I want to use nandwrite for automatic updates
> so I prefer that it marks too many blocks bad than have the update abort
> because nandwrite wants to be conservative and exits instead of flagging
> the offending block and continuing.

Then you probably need to fix the tool. I wonder, it it would make sense
to use libmtd.c from UBI utils and re-write nandwrite? Of course
libmtd.c would need to be improved as well. But the benefit would be
shared code between ubiformat and nandwrite.

> > So the idea of erase is to check whether the block is really bad
> > or this is just a driver bug or something.
> 
> Do you mean that if the erase succeeds, nandwrite shouldn't mark the block
> bad and just exit?

I think it should do something like UBI is doing - erase the eraseblock,
then torture it by writing several patterns and reading them back. If
the eraseblock survived torturing, nandwrite may re-try writing,
otherwise it marks the eraseblock as bad.

> I'm not too familiar with the NAND technology but it is not possible that
> a block can be erasable but not written to? At least nandtest thinks so, it
> mark blocks as bad on either erase or write failures.

Yes, write and erase failure mean that the erasblock is bad. But I think
marking a block as bad straight away is just dangerous. Who knows may be
this is a small glitch in a bus, or a software bug, or some-one
corrupted driver's memory, or whatever. This is why UBI is doing
eraseblock torturing before marking it as bad. And it is very careful
about error codes - only EIO code is considered as a reason to mark an
eraseblock as bad.

> And so does ubiformat. flash_image() either exits or marks the block
> bad if mtd_write fails. It doesn't try to erase it first.

Yes, this is not very good, I've added TODO there. It should torture the
eraseblock - I'll implement this later in libmtd.c.

-- 
Best regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Битюцкий Артём)