From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-path: Received: from majordomo by infradead.org with local (Exim 3.16 #2) id 140nFu-0003nI-00 for mtd-list@infradead.org; Tue, 28 Nov 2000 16:05:18 +0000 Received: from cerebus-ext.cygnus.co.uk ([194.130.39.252] helo=passion.cygnus) by infradead.org with esmtp (Exim 3.16 #2) id 140nFt-0003nC-00 for mtd@infradead.org; Tue, 28 Nov 2000 16:05:17 +0000 From: David Woodhouse In-Reply-To: <20001128085354.L17376@www.easysolutions.net> References: <20001128085354.L17376@www.easysolutions.net> <20001128070007.E17376@www.easysolutions.net> To: Shane Nay Cc: Nicolas Pitre , mtd@infradead.org Subject: Re: XIP kernel + MTD polling interest Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 15:58:02 +0000 Message-ID: <28079.975427082@redhat.com> Sender: owner-mtd@infradead.org List-ID: shane@agendacomputing.com said: > Well, we've come up with a better way (well, Mike Klar did from > linux-vr) to take care of weird c code, and allow everything to be > normal. (Special elf sections, and twiddling with the linker script) Cute, and not too horrible because you already had to copy the data section into RAM at startup anyway. Doing so with an extra section isn't too much of a problem, and there's enough other 'put this code in a different section' magic in the kernel already that that bit isn't too troublesome either. shane@agendacomputing.com said: > I was just thinking XIP kernel with flash stuff might be usefull for > MTD as a general thing, because people might want to take this tact > with various types of chips, etc In general, XIP isn't as interesting as I first thought. XIP is mutually exclusive with compression, and RAM is cheaper than flash. That's even _before_ you try to deal with the horrible problems that you're trying to work round right now. But having said that, some of our customers do seem to be on crack so I'm looking at XIP anyway :) But I'm trying to get away with declaring that the XIP flash chip is _strictly_ read-only, and that the writable filesystem is to be kept on an entirely different flash chip. I should be putting together a version of romfs designed to work on read-only memory chips fairly shortly. -- dwmw2 To unsubscribe, send "unsubscribe mtd" to majordomo@infradead.org