Re: Creating an ext3 partition on an mtd device

[Mark Ryden <markryde@gmail.com>]

Hello, Justin,
Thanks for your answer.

Then why do I have in "Essential Linux Device Drivers" this , in
"Block Device Emulation" section of chapter 17, "Memory Technology
Devices" , this:

Block Device Emulation
The MTD subsystem provides a block driver called mtdblock that
emulates a hard disk over flash memory. You can put any filesystem,
say EXT2, over the emulated flash disk. Mtdblock hides complicated
flash access procedures (such as preceding a write with an erase of
the corresponding sector) from the filesystem. Device nodes created by
mtdblock are named /dev/mtdblock/X, where X is the partition number.
To create an EXT2 filesystem on the pda_fs partition of the handheld,
as shown in Figure 17.2, do the following:
bash> mkfs.ext2 /dev/mtdblock/2                 Create an EXT2 filesystem
                                                 on the second partition

bash> mount /dev/mtdblock/2 /mnt                Mount the partition


Regards,
Mark


On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Justin
Waters<justin.waters@timesys.com> wrote:
> Mark,
>
> On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 15:44 -0400, Mark Ryden wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to create an ext2 partition on an mtd device.
>
> No, you don't.
>
> See: http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/general.html#L_ext2_mtd
>
> and
>
> http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs.html#L_raw_vs_ftl
>
>>  I tried to create a partition with fdisk /dev/mtdblock2
>>  The device is /dev/mtdblock2p1
>>  but: mkfs.ext3 /dev/mtdblock2p1  fails
>>
>>  What should I do ? Is it right in this case to use fdisk at all ?
>
> Unless you have some hard requirement for EXT2, you are much better off
> using a flash file system, like ubifs or jffs2.  Check out
> http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org for more info.
>
>> Regards,
>> Mark Ryden
>
> - Justin Waters
>
>