On Wed, 2 Sep 2009, Rob Landley wrote:
USB keys are the modern successor to floppy drives, and even now
Documentation/blockdev/floppy.txt is still full of some of the torturous
workarounds implemented for that over the past 2 decades. The hardware
existed, and instead of turning up their nose at it they made it work as best
they could.
Perhaps what's needed for the flash thing is a userspace package, the way
mdutils made floppies a lot more usable than the kernel managed at the time.
For the flash problem perhaps some FUSE thing a bit like mtdblock might be
nice, a translation layer remapping an arbitrary underlying block device into
larger granularity chunks and being sure to do the "write the new one before
you erase the old one" trick that so many hardware-only flash devices _don't_,
and then maybe even use Pavel's crash tool to figure out the write granularity
of various sticks and ship it with a whitelist people can email updates to so
we don't have to guess large. (Pressure on the USB vendors to give us a "raw
view" extension bypassing the "pretend to be a hard drive, with remapping"
hardware in future devices would be nice too, but won't help any of the
hardware out in the field. I'm not sure that block remapping wouldn't screw up
_this_ approach either, but it's an example of something that culd be
_tried_.)
However, thinking about how to _fix_ a problem is predicated on acknowledging
that there actually _is_ a problem. "The hardware is not physically damaged
but your data was lost" sounds to me like a software problem, and thus
something software could at least _attempt_ to address. "There's millions of
'em, Linux can't cope" doesn't seem like a useful approach.
no other OS avoids this problem either.
I actually don't see how you can do this from userspace, because when you
write to the device you have _no_ idea where on the device your data will
actually land.
writing in larger chunks may or may not help, (if you do a 128K write,
and the device is emulating 512b blocks on top of 128K eraseblocks,
depending on the current state of the flash translation layer, you could
end up writing to many different eraseblocks, up to the theoretical max of
256)
David Lang
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
