[RFC PATCH 2/2] mtd: nand: use nand_check_erased_ecc_chunk in default ECC read functions

[Richard Weinberger]

Am 03.08.2015 um 15:39 schrieb Andrea Scian:
>>> I think I can find some time to do some performance tests on real hardware.
>>> Can you please help me in finding:
>>> - which benchmark to use (currently I'm using bonnie++ on UBIFS, maybe I
>>> can you just mtd_speedtest)
>>> - where to implement those read
>>
>> I think the test should be done at the UBI layer if we want to check
>> the real impact of the additional read sequence, but given the answer I
>> gave to your other question I'm not sure this is relevant anymore ;-).

I'm not sure whether introducing a read-before-write check is the best solution.
At least we need hard numbers for slow/old SLC NANDs too.

We has such checks already and got rid of them.
commit 657f28f8811c92724db10d18bbbec70d540147d6
Author: Huang Shijie <shijie8 at gmail.com>
Date:   Tue Aug 14 22:38:45 2012 -0400

    mtd: kill MTD_NAND_VERIFY_WRITE


Although the goal of 657f28f8 was something else.

In general I don't think putting much MTD/ECC logic into UBI is the way to go.
UBI is a layer above MTD and MTD should do as much as possible wrt. ECC.

>>>
>>> For the second point I think we can implement it a UBI or MTD level.
>>> I think the former will allow us to easily schedule scrubbing and choose
>>> another block to issue the write to. However I don't really know how to
>>> implement it (I don't really know so much about the UBI code).

Implementing this is not much work.
I've done such hacks for various customers to hunt down hardware issues.

>> I didn't check before suggesting that, but it seems that the UBI layer
>> is already doing this check for you [1], so if you're using UBI/UBIFS
>> you shouldn't worry about bitflips in erased pages: if there is any,
>> and their presence impact the write result, they should be detected.
>> AFAICT, the only thing that is not checked is whether the number of
>> bitflips after a write exceed the bitflips threshold or not, and I
>> guess this can be added.
> 
> IIUC this is a runtime debug check
> 
> if (!ubi_dbg_chk_io(ubi))
>     ....
> 
> And thus is disabled by default.

That's correct.

Thanks,
//richard