Re: [PATCH] mtd: nand: gpmi: fall back to legacy mode if no ECC information present

[stefan@agner.ch]

I accidentally removed ML/cc before, re-adding.

On 31.01.2018 10:57, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2018 10:19:05 +0100
> stefan@agner.ch wrote:
> 
>> On 30.01.2018 14:23, Boris Brezillon wrote:
>> > Hi Stefan,
>> >
>> > On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 15:44:40 +0100
>> > Stefan Agner <stefan@agner.ch> wrote:
>> >
>> >> In case fsl,use-minimum-ecc is set, the driver tries to determine
>> >> ECC layout by using the ECC information provided by the MTD stack.
>> >> However, in case the NAND chip does not provide any information,
>> >> the driver currently fails with:
>> >>   nand: device found, Manufacturer ID: 0xc2, Chip ID: 0xf1
>> >>   nand: Macronix NAND 128MiB 3,3V 8-bit
>> >>   nand: 128 MiB, SLC, erase size: 128 KiB, page size: 2048, OOB size: 64
>> >>   gpmi-nand 1806000.gpmi-nand: Error setting BCH geometry : 1
>> >>   gpmi-nand: probe of 1806000.gpmi-nand failed with error 1
>> >>
>> >> Fall back to implementation specific default mode if no ECC
>> >> information are provided by the NAND chip and fsl,use-minimum-ecc
>> >> is specified.
>> >
>> > Hm, this sounds a bit fragile: if we ever fix the Macronix driver
>> > (which should be done BTW) to set the appropriate ECC requirements, it
>> > will break all platforms that were relying on this 'fall back to legacy
>> > logic'.
>>
>> I see. It is just that downstream behaves that way, hence we sell
>> modules which use minimal ECC on ONFI enabled chips and legacy (maximum
>> ECC which fits into OOB) on modules with non-ONFI chips.
> 
> And I guess you use the same DT for both variants of the board :-/
> 

Actually we only have two SKUs, and they differ also otherwise so I have
two DTs anyway.

>>
>> Currently we operate the above Macronix chip with 8-bit ECC since quite
>> a while.
> 
> Honestly, I don't see a good solution here except adding an extra DT or
> live-patching it from the bootloader, because, even if this hack works
> for you know, it might not in the future.

Extra DT is fine for Linux.

The problem is more with U-Boot, where I tried to add minimal ECC
support via Kconfig symbol and align with Linux behavior. For U-Boot I
would really prefer to have a single binary for all SKUs...

I already sent a first patchset
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/867180/

I guess it should be somehow possible to do a board specific selection
of ECC. But this is a discussion for another thread.

> 
> In the future, if you plan to have boards with different variants of
> NANDs, I recommend that you always maximize ECC, this way you won't
> have this kind of issues.

Makes sense. Unfortunately, for those products we already ship, changing
would be rather painful.

> 
>>
>> > So, if what you really want is legacy_set_geometry(), don't specify
>> > "fsl,use-minimum-ecc" in your DT and you should be good. Otherwise, fix
>> > the Macronix driver to initialize ->ecc_{strength,step_size}_ds
>> > appropriately.
>>
>> The datasheet says:
>> • High Reliability
>> - Endurance: 100K cycles (with 1-bit ECC per 528-byte)
>>
>> So we would set ecc_strenght to 1?
> 
> If the datasheet says so, then yes, you should have
> ->ecc_strength_ds = 1 and ->ecc_step_size_ds = 512.
> 
>> But then there is almost no room for
>> wear leveling. I remember that I dumped the fixed bits once on such a
>> chip, and there were several blocks from factory which needed one bit
>> fixed...
> 
> Well, that's a different issue. You might want to maximize the ECC
> strength for your specific board. In this case, you should not specify
> "fsl,use-minimum-ecc" in your DT, or, if the driver supports it (but I
> doubt it does), you should add "nand-ecc-maximize". Alternatively, if
> you want to keep some of the OOB space, you can ask for a specific ECC
> config with the "nand-ecc-strength" and "nand-ecc-step-size" properties.

Different issue, but in the end all I care about: Does wear leveling
work properly.

The NAND chip documentation also mentions that typical access is per
page (2K), I guess if one uses a single ECC across the complete page
then 4-bits are available, which should allow a somewhat decent wear
leveling.

I guess we can go with nand-ecc-strength/nand-ecc-step-size for that
chip for now.

However, in Linux we should at least fix the device tree bindings
documentation for "fsl,use-minimum-ecc" then.

--
Stefan