ST NAND flash + u-boot + linux

[Pete MacKay]

I've seen two posts in the past month pertaining to problems with these
8-bit NANDs, and I can sympathize after trying to get root to mount on a
512R3A myself.  The first problem seemed to be a non-standard OOB layout
causing the block to be marked bad when formatted for or loaded with
jffs2.  We still battled with mounting a rootfs taking far too long to
mount after writing two custom drivers, and the design was spun to the
16-bit OneNAND that we're debugging now.

I'd love to hear from people who have been successful with the ST NANDs if
they had to write custom drivers?  Did you customize a software ECC layout
too?

Mete, if there's a way you can boot and mount a non-root jffs2 image on
this, first check to see if your file system has no space left after the
clean-marker scan.  Even without Linux you can use u-boot to check the OOB
data in the partition to see if the blocks are being marked bad (I think
it was byte 5, if I remember?  0xFF = good).

Good Luck!