[PATCH 3/4] UBI: use the whole MTD device size to get bad_peb_limit

Artem Bityutskiy dedekind1 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 15 11:08:51 EDT 2012


On Tue, 2012-07-10 at 18:23 +0200, Richard Genoud wrote:
> +			/* we are using here the whole MTD device size and not
> +			 * the MTD partition size because the maximum number of
> +			 * bad blocks is a percentage of the whole device and
> +			 * the bad blocks are not fairly disposed on a flash
> +			 * device
> +			 */

Would you please use proper kernel-style comments instead, to be
consistent with the rest of the UBI code? I've amended this one, but
wanted to note for future.

I've re-based your patch against the latest UBI. I've also tried to
improve the Kconfig help message as well. Below is the patch I ended up
with.



From cb14c6c5455443cbe960a36e77b3fcd0e5bc7152 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Richard Genoud <richard.genoud at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 18:23:41 +0200
Subject: [PATCH 2/2] UBI: use the whole MTD device size to get bad_peb_limit

On NAND flash devices, UBI reserves some physical erase blocks (PEB) for
bad block handling. Today, the number of reserved PEB can only be set as a
percentage of the total number of PEB in each MTD partition. For example, for a
NAND flash with 128KiB PEB, 2 MTD partition of 20MiB (mtd0) and 100MiB (mtd1)
and 2% reserved PEB:
 - the UBI device on mtd0 will have 2 PEB reserved
 - the UBI device on mtd1 will have 16 PEB reserved

The problem with this behaviour is that NAND flash manufacturers give a
minimum number of valid block (NVB) during the endurance life of the
device, e.g.:

Parameter             Symbol    Min    Max    Unit      Notes
--------------------------------------------------------------
Valid block number     NVB     1004    1024   Blocks     1
Note:
1. Invalid blocks are block that contain one or more bad bits beyond
ECC. The device may contain bad blocks upon shipment. Additional bad
blocks may develop over time; however, the total number of available
blocks will not drop below NVB during the endurance life of the device.

From this number we can deduce the maximum number of bad PEB that a device will
contain during its endurance life: a 128MiB NAND flash (1024 PEB) will not have
less than 20 bad blocks during the flash endurance life.

But the manufacturer doesn't tell where those bad block will appear. He doesn't
say either if they will be equally disposed on the whole device (and I'm pretty
sure they won't). So, according to the datasheets, we should reserve the
maximum number of bad PEB for each UBI device (worst case scenario: 20 bad
blocks appears on the smallest MTD partition).

So this patch make UBI use the whole MTD device size to calculate the maximum
bad expected eraseblocks.

The Kconfig option is in per1024 blocks, thus it can have a default value of 20
which is *very* common for NAND devices.

Signed-off-by: Richard Genoud <richard.genoud at gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy at linux.intel.com>
---
 drivers/mtd/ubi/Kconfig |   27 +++++++++++++++++++++------
 drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c |   21 ++++++++++++++++++---
 2 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/mtd/ubi/Kconfig b/drivers/mtd/ubi/Kconfig
index b2f4f0f..98bda6c 100644
--- a/drivers/mtd/ubi/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/mtd/ubi/Kconfig
@@ -28,14 +28,29 @@ config MTD_UBI_WL_THRESHOLD
 	  to 128 or 256, although it does not have to be power of 2).
 
 config MTD_UBI_BEB_LIMIT
-	int "Percentage of maximum expected bad eraseblocks"
-	default 2
-	range 0 25
+	int "Maximum expected bad eraseblock count per 1024 eraseblocks"
+	default 20
+	range 2 256
 	help
 	  This option specifies the maximum bad physical eraseblocks UBI
-	  expects on the UBI device (percents of total number of physical
-	  eraseblocks on this MTD partition). If the underlying flash does not
-	  admit of bad eraseblocks (e.g. NOR flash), this value is ignored.
+	  expects on the MTD device (per 1024 eraseblocks). If the underlying
+	  flash does not admit of bad eraseblocks (e.g. NOR flash), this value
+	  is ignored.
+
+	  NAND datasheets often specify the minimum and maximum NVM (Number of
+	  Valid Blocks) for the flashes' endurance lifetime. The maximum
+	  expected bad eraseblocks per 1024 eraseblocks then can be calculated
+	  as "1024 * (1 - MinNVB / MaxNVB)", which gives 20 for most NANDs
+	  (MaxNVB is basically the total count of eraseblocks on the chip).
+
+	  To put it differently, if this value is 20, UBI will try to reserve
+	  about 1.9% of physical eraseblocks for bad blocks handling. And that
+	  will be 1.9% of eraseblocks on the entire NAND chip, not just the MTD
+	  partition UBI attaches. This means that if you have, say,  if a NAND
+	  flash chip admits maximum 40 bad eraseblocks, and it is split on two
+	  MTD partitions of the same size, UBI will reserve 40 eraseblocks when
+	  attaching a partition.
+
 	  Leave the default value if unsure.
 
 config MTD_UBI_GLUEBI
diff --git a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
index 7b6b5f9..9fd8d86 100644
--- a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
+++ b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
@@ -36,6 +36,7 @@
 #include <linux/namei.h>
 #include <linux/stat.h>
 #include <linux/miscdevice.h>
+#include <linux/mtd/partitions.h>
 #include <linux/log2.h>
 #include <linux/kthread.h>
 #include <linux/kernel.h>
@@ -610,11 +611,25 @@ static int io_init(struct ubi_device *ubi)
 	if (mtd_can_have_bb(ubi->mtd)) {
 		ubi->bad_allowed = 1;
 		if (CONFIG_MTD_UBI_BEB_LIMIT > 0) {
-			int percent = CONFIG_MTD_UBI_BEB_LIMIT;
-			int limit = mult_frac(ubi->peb_count, percent, 100);
+			int per1024 = CONFIG_MTD_UBI_BEB_LIMIT;
+			int limit, device_pebs;
+			uint64_t device_size;
+
+			/*
+			 * Here we are using size of the entire flash chip and
+			 * not just the MTD partition size because the maximum
+			 * number of bad eraseblocks is a percentage of the
+			 * whole device and bad eraseblocks are not fairly
+			 * distributed over the flash chip. So the worst case
+			 * is that all the bad eraseblocks of the chip are in
+			 * the MTD partition we are attaching (ubi->mtd).
+			 */
+			device_size = mtd_get_device_size(ubi->mtd);
+			device_pebs = mtd_div_by_eb(device_size, ubi->mtd);
+			limit = mult_frac(device_pebs, per1024, 1024);
 
 			/* Round it up */
-			if (mult_frac(limit, 100, percent) < ubi->peb_count)
+			if (mult_frac(limit, 1024, per1024) < ubi->peb_count)
 				limit += 1;
 			ubi->bad_peb_limit = limit;
 		}
-- 
1.7.10.4

-- 
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy
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