From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Scott Wood Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:37:07 -0600 Subject: [U-Boot] [PATCH 0/5] Add support for using an UBI volume for environment In-Reply-To: <1360354046-32392-1-git-send-email-joe.hershberger@ni.com> (from joe.hershberger@ni.com on Fri Feb 8 14:07:21 2013) Message-ID: <1360636627.8517.15@snotra> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: u-boot@lists.denx.de On 02/08/2013 02:07:21 PM, Joe Hershberger wrote: > NAND is not good at handling absolute addresses to sectors for storing > particular data. The current implementation of the NAND env support > works around this in several ways such as storing a pointer to the > sector in the OOB of the first sector (interferes with some CRC) or > supporting a range of sectors (which unless it is huge is not > guaranteed to be safe). None of these options address wear-leveling > concerns or bad block handling. > > Accessing the u-boot env from UBI eliminates these concerns. However, > it does require some of the basic settings for finding the UBI env to > be in the default u-boot env. The downside is this moves us further away from having an environment available before relocation (e.g. loaded by SPL), which is important not just for serial config but also hwconfig, which can affect how RAM is set up among other things. Maybe the "OOB of first sector" approach could be changed to be more like how bad block tables are allocated, with a special marker in the env block's own OOB that we scan for. -Scott