State of read-only filesystems in NAND / MTD bad blocks handling when reading

[Thilo Fromm]

Hi guys,

I'm on a TI embedded system on kernel 2.6.37. Could you please fill me
in on the current state of readonly filesystems living in NAND flash
w/ bad blocks? I've found several discussions on linux-mtd over the
years[1][2][3] but none seemed to have reached a conclusion. The point
is this, while both bootloader and nandwrite will happily skip bad
blocks encountered upon image write the MTD driver's read function
will not.

This means I can safely write the root fs into a MTD partition, but I
cannot read it back safely (let alone mount it). Is there a generic
way to have the MTD driver auto-skip bad blocks? What happened to
MTD_BLOCK_RO_BBFREE?

[1] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2004-May/009672.html
[2] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2004-May/009683.html
[3] http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2006-November/016835.html

Regards,
Thilo

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Dipl.-Ing (FH) Thilo Fromm, MSc., Embedded Systems Architect
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