[U-Boot] Booting kernel from NAND flash on AT91SAM9 custom board using fsload

[Nicholas Kinar <n.kinar@usask.ca>]

On 29/03/2011 3:05 PM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Nicholas Kinar,
>
> In message<4D92428E.6030503@usask.ca>  you wrote:
>> (1) Does replacing jffs2_1pass.c with jffs2_nand_1pass.c in the fs/jffs2
>> directory influence the robustness of the fsload code?
> JFFS2 is more or less deprecated these days.  FOr new projects, we
> recommend to use UBI/ UBIFS instead.
>
>> (2) Does it take a long time to load the Linux kernel from a JFFS2
>> filesystem on NAND flash using the fsload command (i.e.
> JFFS2 has always been slow, especially when mounting larger file
> systems.  This is one of the resons we recommend UBIFS instead.
>
>> or has this been cleaned up in the current u-boot-2010.09 code?
> v2010.09 is in no way "current".  The latest release available at this
> moment is v2010.12, and v2011.03 is a mere few days aways.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Wolfgang Denk
>

Thanks for your response, Wolfgang - I will switch the file system to 
UBI/UBIFS, and then post back what I've done.  I've been looking in the 
include/configs/sheevaplug.h directory, and I think that this small 
embedded computer is now using UBIFS as the NAND flash file system.  So 
changing the configs for my embedded system should be reasonably 
straightforward.

I would assume that the "fsload" command will also work with UBIFS as well.

In my custom system, At91Bootstrap is situated on SPI Dataflash.  The 
At91Bootstrap loads U-Boot from the same Dataflash.  Then, I would like 
U-Boot to load the Linux kernel from the UBI file system on a large 2 
GByte NAND flash.  This should be much better than using JFFS2 on the 
large NAND flash.

Nicholas