Re: DOC2000 support for a custom PPC750 board

[Boris Bulkin <boris@emcraft.ru>]

David,

Thank you very much for the quick response. The information you've given is an
exelent help for me to get started.

One more question: from the M-Sys documents I understand there can be two types
of partitions on a DOC device, binary and NFTL. Binary is supposed to store an
OS image, and NFTL be used as a filesystem. Are there any MTD tools for
creating and reading/writing binary DOC partitions?
Sorry if it sonds silly. I'm not very familiar with DOC and MTD.

Thanks,
Boris

David Woodhouse wrote:

> boris@emcraft.ru said:
> >  I'm new to the MTD project, so any information will be very
> > appreciated. What is the current state of MTD support for DOC?
>
> It works, for the DiskOnChip 2000 and DiskOnChip Millennium. Not the
> Millennium Plus. It doesn't do sane wear-levelling though. That's left as an
> exercise for the reader. Pointers and CVS access will happily be given to
> anyone who looks serious about doing it.
>
> > Do MTD DOC drivers require any firmware from M-Sys, or does MTD provide
> > its own DOC firmware?
>
> The DiskOnChip requires no firmware. It is not an intelligent device.
> What's normally referred to as the DiskOnChip 'firmware' is the BIOS
> extension which installs a driver which hooks the PC INT 13h disk service
> interrupt and hence makes DOS and LILO work. I assume you don't want that :)
>
> > Then, I know that M-Systems  suggests running its
> > DOS-based tools for partitioning and formatting a DOC device. Are
> > there any open-source replacements for them?
>
> There is nftl_format.c which performs the basic function of creating an
> NFTL on the raw flash. NFTL is the translation layer used on the DiskOnChip
> devices to emulate a normal block device. It is preferred to use the DOS
> utilities because their response to finding bad blocks has been far better
> tested. But nftl_format should be OK.
>
> --
> dwmw2