[RFC] UBIFS recovery

[Richard Weinberger]

Am 06.02.2015 um 18:26 schrieb Artem Bityutskiy:
> On Thu, 2015-02-05 at 07:08 -0800, Steve deRosier wrote:
>> I hear (and agree with) several valid arguments for a tool in
>> userspace. And I'd like to throw my support towards an in-driver
>> solution. Flash filesystems are different than on-disk filesystems, in
>> particular in their usecase: they're generally both critical and
>> exclusive to embedded systems. As such, the entire filesystem might be
>> on the corrupted UBIFS, so even if the filesystem is recoverable, if
>> we can't mount it and get at the userspace tool, then we're toast.
>> Often the kernel itself is stored in a separate read-only partition as
>> a blob directly on the flash, and thus the kernel itself would be
>> fine. The better UBI & UBIFS can recover to a usable state in-kernel,
>> the better off we are I think.
> 
> Yes, being able to mount a corrupted FS R/O sounds like a good goal. We
> are not speaking of recovery here, just about mounting R/O and providing
> access to as much uncorrupted data as we can.
> 
> If FS index is not corrupted, this sounds quite doable. If the index is
> corrupted, though, this requires full scan and index rebuild. Other wise
> we'd mount and show empty file-system.

While I agree that mounting RO to get access to data is a feasible goal
I really think that this is the job of a debugfs.ubifs tool.
The kernel cannot ask questions, such a tool can.

Thanks,
//richard