On 11/21/06, Srinivas G. <srinivasg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Before porting Linux, I wanted to know whether any tool available on Linux for compacting and maintaining optimal life of my NOR flash?
Tools can't improve the life of a flash but there are best practices you can follow to improve the overall lifetime. All hardwares are expected to fail one day and for flash with limited number of write/erase cycle bad planning can cause premature demise of the product: - Use file systems specifically designed for flash, like JFFS2 - they distribute write cycles and manage the available space in a better way than with other file systems. - NOR chips are XIP capable and can be mapped to be the boot device, in which case, the first few sectors are used for bootup making them critical and should not be often erased - You can implement modular bootup - have a very small and very robust 0th stage boot loader at the first few sectors. The only job of this stage will be to bootstrap the 1st stage loader. you can deploy redundant 1st stage loaders. - You can partition your flash and have different filesystems on them. For eg: the firmware can be on cramfs and the configurations on jffs2. -- Vijairaj http://vijairaj.r.googlepages.com/ http://vijairaj.blogspot.com/ -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
