Re: UBI and OneNand

[John Smith <John.Smith@arrows.demon.co.uk>]

Frank Haverkamp <haver <at> vnet.ibm.com> writes:

> 
> Hi John,
> 
> On Sat, 2006-11-04 at 08:22 +0000, John wrote:
> > I have a board with a MIPS core and a OneNAND flash.  ...
> > 
> > I have made the kernel from ubi-2.6.git run on my board. Now I would be
> > grateful for answers to some questions to help me get UBI going.
> > 
> >   1. Should I expect UBI to run on OneNAND without change, or should I
> >      expect to have to write or adapt some code?
> 
> UBI should run on mostly any mtd device. I tried it on NAND as well as
> NOR mtds.

I have now tried it. It does run. 

> 
> > 
> >   3. My attempt to build the ubi tools from the git
> >      users/haver/mtd-utils.git failed.  The tools use the argp
> >      functions to parse command line args, but my root file system
> >      based on uclibc doesn't support argp. I propose to collect argp
> >      sources following instructions in
> >      http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=gnulib and try again. Any
> >      better suggestions?
> 
> Mhm, I wonder if we should remove the argp parsing again and replace it
> by more portable code. I am not sure about this yet.

I did get the ubi-tools to compile with argp code from gnulib.
There is probably an elegant solution using automake and friends 
and the sources from gnulib. But I just hacked a Makefile and a config.h 
together, and changed the names of two functions from getopt.h 
to avoid clashes with my uclibc implementation.

In the ubi-tools directory there is a script "ubi_test.sh". 
This script appeared to run successfully as well.

> 
> > 
> >   5. What is the way to get jffs2 running on an UBI partition?  Should
> >      I still be aiming to use gluebi to provide an MTD partition on
> >      top of a UBI partition (whatever that means)? Cook book
> >      instructions would be very helpful.
> 
> Yes, gluebi is used to create the MTD which can be used by JFFS2. We had
> some iterations over the code, and finally came up with the code
> available in our ubi-2.6.git. The original from Joern was reworked by
> Artem, the currently available solution has only very few changes to
> JFFS2.
> 

I think the following commands just worked:

  mkdir /mnt/nvm
  flash_eraseall /dev/mtd6
  mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock6 /mnt/nvm 


I wonder whether this is the first attempt to run a kernel using
jffs2 and ubi and mtd and onenand and mips? First or not, it seems to work. 

Thanks,
John Smith