Testing generic empty page bit flips recovery

[Boris Brezillon]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2015 09:33:52 -0600
"Franklin S Cooper Jr." <fcooper at ti.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> On 12/30/2015 08:40 AM, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > Hi Franklin,
> >
> > On Wed, 30 Dec 2015 08:10:20 -0600
> > "Franklin S Cooper Jr." <fcooper at ti.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I am trying to follow up on this discussion from this patch
> >> set (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/539059/) which
> >> suggested that Michael instead test the generic bitflips
> >> recovery that is implemented by Boris "mtd: nand: properly
> >> handle bitflips in erased pages" patchset
> >> (http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2015-September/061617.html).
> >> I would like to test Boris patchset but first I need to
> >> recreate the error that his patch is fixing.
> >>
> >> The error that the patchset is attempting to fix isn't
> >> something I have ever encountered before. Currently I am
> >> trying to reproduce this issue on a TI K2E evm that uses the
> >> davinci nand driver. I flashed the nand's file-system
> >> partition with a ubi filesystem and the board is currently
> >> set to boot using the file-system on the nand. After about
> >> 60 secs I cut the power from the board and boot the board
> >> again. What I would expect is that the board will eventually
> >> fail to mount the ubi filesystem but currently the board has
> >> ran for over 24 hours and powered on and off over 1400 times
> >> and its still mounting the file-system perfectly fine.
> >>
> >> Any suggestions on a test case that I can use to force the
> >> empty page bit flips error?
> >>
> >>
> > The davinci driver seems to support raw accesses, so you can try to
> > apply this patch [1] against the mtd-utils tree (not sure it still
> > applies cleany, but it should work with mtd-utils-1.5.1), and use the
> > nandflipbits tool:
> >
> > # flash_erase /dev/mtdX <offset> 1
> > # nandflipbits /dev/mtdX 1@<offset>
> > # nanddump -f /tmp/dump -s <offset> -l <page-size> /dev/mtdX
> >
> > Without the patch, nanddump should complain about uncorrectable errors,
> > and if you hexdump /dev/dump you should see the bitflip.
> > If nanddump does not complain after applying my patch, then it means it
> > fixes the "bitflips in erased pages" bug.
> >
> > Best Regards,
> >
> > Boris
> >
> > [1]http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-mtd/2014-November/056634.html
> 
> Hi Boris,
> 
> Thanks for the quick reply. I built mtd-utils with your
> patch and ran the suggested commands on a 4.1 based kernel
> without your kernel patchset and I didn't see your expected
> output. The 4.1 based kernel hasn't had any changes to
> davinci_nand or nand subsystem that would address this
> bitflip error.
> 
> I'm currently going to attempt to run the same test on the
> latest mainline.
> 
> Here is the output I received when I ran your suggested
> commands on the 4.1 based kernel.Any
> root at k2e-evm:~# ./flash_erase /dev/mtd4 4096 1
> Erasing 128 Kibyte @ 0 -- 100 % complete
> root at k2e-evm:~# ./nandflipbits /dev/mtd4 1 at 4096
> root at k2e-evm:~# ./nanddump -f /tmp/dump -s 4096 -l 2048
> /dev/mtd4
> ECC failed: 0
> ECC corrected: 0
> Number of bad blocks: 0
> Number of bbt blocks: 4
> Block size 131072, page size 2048, OOB size 64
> root at k2e-evm:~# hexdump /tmp/dump
> 0000000 fffd ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
> 0000010 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
> *
> 0000800
> 
> Any thoughts on why I'm not seeing the expected error?
> 
Oh, actually this behavior is explained in the commit message:

"Currently empty page bit flips are not corrected and report 0 errors."

Which explains why you're seeing the bitflip in the dump, but nothing
reported by the MTD layer.

After applying my patch, the bitflip should simply disappear. You can
then try to generate more bitflips than the engine can actually fix
(nandflipbits /dev/mtd4 1 at 0:5 at 0:49 at 0:98 at 0:132 at 0) and check that MTD
reports an uncorrectable error.

-- 
Boris Brezillon, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com