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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I have been using the IGEL flash driver on a Linux
2.2.12 system now for several months. One very annoying "feature" is that
it causes the entire OS to hang for 2-5 seconds after mounting or moderate write
operations. I talked with an M-Systems tech and although they did not
write the driver, he thought it might be due to the garbage collection running
in the DOC2000 firmware. When a block becomes some configurable percentage
utilized, the garbage collector tries to coallesce the used portion of this
block with others to decrease block fragmentation and increase
wearability. His theory was that the driver would request space for a
particular write operation and if garbage collection was necessary, the write
operation would block. My problem is that when this happens and the
blocking lasts for > 1.5 seconds, my watchdog refresh process can't pet the
watchdog and the system resets. I have tried making the watchdog process a
real-time thread with RTLinux, but the RTLinux beta11 is proving to be a little
unstable for my blood right now. I am wondering if anyone has encountered
this problem and/or may have some advice for me. Does the MTD DOC2000
driver suffer from this behavior and can it be patched into a 2.2.12
kernel? Any other thoughts?</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>TIA!</FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Regards,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Jon</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>