Re: [PATCH] mtd: gpmi: properly handle bitflips in erased pages

Brian Norris
2014-12-01T23:37:48Z

On Mon, Dec 01, 2014 at 09:18:18PM +0100, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2014 11:41:39 -0800 Brian Norris <computersforpeace@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Dec 01, 2014 at 08:12:39PM +0100, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > > Brian, I really like the idea of having a generic implementation for this
> > > feature (using read_page_raw) as you suggested here [1], but this implies
> > > having a temporary buffer to store the page read in raw mode and keep the page
> > > read in normal (HW ECC engine eanbled) mode, and I'm not sure we want to
> > > allocate more buffers than we already have.
> >
> > Why does this require an additional buffer? If we've already noticed an
> > ECC error, we're expected to return raw data anyway, so what's the
> > problem with clobbering the original data with a raw version of the
> > data?
>
> Well in the GPMI particular case (and more generally all NAND
> controllers which do not support subpage write) this is true, but if you
> can do subpage write, then you might have a bit flip in a specific
> chunk which is still empty, while other chunks are written and are
> expecting standard ECC correction.
> In this case you want to keep the 3 chunks with standard ECC correction
> and only one in raw mode with 'erased page bitflips' fixed.

So the problem's not really with subpage write, exactly; the problem is
for drivers that support subpage write, we don't have a way to perform a
raw subpage read without touching the other subpages.

Brian