[U-Boot] YAFFS2 and getting the NAND formatted

[U-Boot] YAFFS2 and getting the NAND formatted

[J.C. Wren]

I'm still at a major chicken-and-the-egg stage here, with regards to YAFFS2.
 I have YAFFS2 support compiled in the kernel, and in U-boot.  I boot into
u-boot, I can loady my kernel, write it, yload the YAFFS2 image generated by
mkyaffs2image... and then what?  Can't use 'nand write' because it doesn't
write the OOB for YAFFS2.  I have a bunch of handy file commands for YAFFS2,
but nothing like 'yformat', or
'ycopy_memory_to_NAND_and_make_a_useful_YAFFS2_image' (please shorten that
command if you can :) ).
If I had a valid image copy in, I see that I can mount and unmount my image
(although no reference is given as to where the mount point is).  'ydump'
might do something with a valid image, but it just returns with 0 output, so
I'm not sure exactly what it does.

I see references to 'nand write.yaffs2' which looks like it might do what I
want, but that seems to be non-existent.  Was this replaced by something
else?

All the solutions that don't involve 'nand write.yaffs2' involve booting to
Linux and mounting /dev/mtdblockX... Which doesn't really work when you
don't a root filesystem (No Ethernet, USB doesn't work right yet (can't get
a kernel to recognize the USB pen drive, although u-boot does quite nicely).

So what's a user to do?  I'm persevering, googling, compiling, programming,
examining source... But I don't see how one gets a YAFFS2 image into NAND
from a u-boot + serial console method.

--jc

[U-Boot] YAFFS2 and getting the NAND formatted

[Scott Wood]

J.C. Wren wrote:
> I see references to 'nand write.yaffs2' which looks like it might do what I
> want, but that seems to be non-existent.  Was this replaced by something
> else?

It's not yet supported in mainline.  There have been some patches 
floating around, but none has been formally submitted for merging.

See:
http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot/u-boot-blackfin.git;a=commitdiff;h=44f07de8cc94836cd3b0fd2fb0cf8b8651461087

> All the solutions that don't involve 'nand write.yaffs2' involve booting to
> Linux and mounting /dev/mtdblockX... Which doesn't really work when you
> don't a root filesystem (No Ethernet, USB doesn't work right yet (can't get
> a kernel to recognize the USB pen drive, although u-boot does quite nicely).

You could try using an initrd/initramfs (attached to the kernel image, 
or loaded by u-boot) which includes the image to be written.

Or you could try using jffs2 to bootstrap things.

Or fix USB. :-)

-Scott