From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from majordomo by infradead.org with local (Exim 3.03 #1) id 12lL40-0005tB-00 for mtd-list@infradead.org; Sat, 29 Apr 2000 01:24:52 +0100 Received: from gate.mvhi.com ([194.205.184.34] helo=server.axiom.internal) by infradead.org with esmtp (Exim 3.03 #1) id 12lL3z-0005t5-00 for mtd@infradead.org; Sat, 29 Apr 2000 01:24:51 +0100 From: David Woodhouse In-Reply-To: References: To: Jamey Hicks Cc: "'Trevor Woolven'" , MTD Subject: Re: TODO List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 01:27:59 +0100 Message-ID: <26113.956968079@server.axiom.internal> Sender: owner-mtd@imladris.demon.co.uk List-ID: jamey@crl.dec.com said: > What's wrong with FTL? Technically, there are two main problems. Firstly, it's broken - it works for a while and then seems to corrupt the FTL. I can't see how I did that in porting David Hinds' code to use the MTD flash access routines - so it could be an SMP issue (I'm testing on SMP) or it could be because I'm testing on the RAM device, which calls the 'erase done' callback directly from within the erase routine.. Secondly, it makes no attempt to handle byte-swapping - so if you run it on a BE machine, then your FTL is all BE, which doesn't conform to the spec, and obviously won't be portable to LE machines. We need to pepper it with cpu_to_le16() and le16_to_cpu() all over the place. > What's the state of it wrt licensing M-Systems patents? M-Systems have a patent which covers FTL, but they've given a licence to use it on all PCMCIA devices. They have not granted a licence to use it with non-PCMCIA devices. > Can it be used for systems with onboard flash? I assume that's not actually the question you meant to ask. Can it be used? Yes - although you'd do better to use JFFS. May it be used? Only if you live in the Free World. -- dwmw2 To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe mtd" to majordomo@infradead.org