Frequent Writes to NAND flash with UBIFS in sychronous mode

[Joe]

Hi,
 I have the following observation when UBIFS is mounted as synchronous fs. (-o
sync option from bootargs). 

 1. For every file read, there are writes  to nand flash. 
 2. For the execution of every command, there are writes to nand flash. 
 For ex. On execution of any command, say 'cd' or 'ls' i observe quiet a few
writes happening to NAND flash. 

What could be the reason for this behaviour? Any other option to bring down the
amount of writes but by retaining the synchronous behaviour? 

With sync option enabled, we expect Flash writes to happen more frequently ,
how-ever we do not want  writes to happen with the execution of every command. 

This observation holds true for linux 2.6.28, 2.6.35 & 3.4.10 linux kernel
versions. 

Since, there is a limit on number of writes per block of nand flash, we are
concerned if the above behaviour will trigger a faster nand corruption on the
long run. 

Regards,
Joe.