Should flash hardware look like UBI?

[David Woodhouse]

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 14:56 +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> 
> I guess the bad block hiding might work, but I'm concerned about the
> wear levelling aspect. That's what they usually fail to do in a
> sensible way. When the resulting carefully hidden and obscured
> algorithm is just contrary to what the filesystem expects you are
> again digging holes in your device within no time.

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense for the wear levelling to be done
explicitly by the OS, not in the device.

So maybe we don't want the interface to be _quite_ like UBI.

But if we can let the device handle _some_ of the aspects of the
logical<->physical translation, that would be interesting. Partly
because it could do the full scan of the device at startup _internally_,
and it wouldn't slow down the OS.

I'd be happy with limiting it to _just_ what hard drives to; ECC and a
1:1 remapping of blocks. Basically 'hardware acceleration for UBI'.

-- 
dwmw2