Can major re-organization activities of the UBIfs be "deliberately provoked"?

[Atlant Schmidt]

Folks:

  We're using the UBIfs with our realtime equipment. We've
  noticed a behavior where, every so often, the flush-ubifs
  thread demands very, very large amounts of CPU time, blocking
  all of our other processes that use the Linux time-sliced
  scheduler. These bursts come at arbitrary intervals but
  commonly last ten to fifteen seconds.

  Naturally, these bursts come at exceedingly inconvenient
  times ;-).

  I *ASSUME* these bursts occur when the UBI file system has
  decided that it has to do some major Flash housekeeping;
  these bursts are associated with our application doing a
  lot of writing but *ARE NOT* associated with the display
  of any UBI/MTD error messages. (If my assumption is wrong,
  please feel free to correct me!)

  So three questions:

    1. Has this bursty behavior changed for the better
       in more-recent versions of the MTD/UBI/UBIfs code?
       (We're probably running pretty old versions of each.)

    2. Are there any tuning parameters that would let us
       spread this work out more smoothly (that is, in a
       less-bursty fashion)?

    3. Are there any APIs that would let us deliberately
       provoke this work at times that would be more-convenient
       for the rest of our application (such as when we're
       booting up or shutting down)?

                            Atlant


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