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Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:04:06 -1000
From: Mitch Bradley <wmb@firmworks.com>
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To: linux-mtd@lists.infradead.org
Subject: mtd partitions limited to 4 GB?
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In drivers/mtd/mtdpart.c, struct mtd_part has  "u_int32_t offset", thus 
(apparently) limiting the partition start offset to 4 GiB.  Similarly, 
struct mtd_partition in include/linux/mtd/partititions.h has "u_int32_t 
size" and "u_int32_offset".

Now that NAND FLASH device sizes have exceeded that, this appears to be 
a significant limitation.

Is anyone in the mtd community already addressing this?

Fixing the core infrastructure might be as simple as using "loff_t" 
instead of "u_int32_t" for those fields.  However, all of the existing 
partition map parsers appear to have the same 32-bit limitation, so 
partitioning a >4GiB device will require a new or modified partition map 
format.