Commit graph

47 commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Artem Bityutskiy
7cdb996ee4 UBI: do not print message about corruptes PEBs if we have none of them
Currently UBI prints

UBI: corrupted PEBs will be formatted

even if there are not corrupted PEBs. Fix this.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-08-02 07:21:19 +03:00
Brijesh Singh
158132c9ab UBI: improve delete-compatible volumes handling
When a delete-compatible volume is found, it is first added to the
'corr' list, which contains "corrupted" PEBs which should be erased,
and then it is added to the used volumes tree. However, the second
step should not be done. This does not cause problems in practice,
because we never access delete-compattible volumes, but it is still
not the right thing to do.

[Artem: amended the commit message and few prints]

Signed-off-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-06-16 09:39:49 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
f5d5b1f8c1 UBI: fix error message and compilation warnings
Fix the followong compilation warnings introduced by commit
095751a6e0:

drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c: In function 'check_what_we_have':
drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c:960: warning: passing argument 1 of 'get_random_bytes' discards qualifiers from pointer target type

Fix the following compilation warnings introduced by commit
1a49af2ca0:

drivers/mtd/ubi/io.c: In function 'ubi_io_read':
drivers/mtd/ubi/io.c:153: warning: initialization makes integer from pointer without a cast
drivers/mtd/ubi/io.c:170: warning: format '%s' expects type 'char *', but argument 5 has type 'int'
drivers/mtd/ubi/io.c:177: warning: format '%zd' expects type 'signed size_t', but argument 7 has type 'int'
drivers/mtd/ubi/io.c:177: warning: too many arguments for format

Also, amend the ECC error code string and add brackets and whitespace
there - this should make the message readable.

Reported-by: Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-06-14 08:47:49 +03:00
Matthieu CASTET
095751a6e0 UBI: generate random image_seq when formatting MTD devices
Generate random image_seq when attaching empty MTD device (kernel do the
ubi formating).

Signed-off-by: Matthieu CASTET <matthieu.castet@parrot.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-06-11 17:23:37 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
0798cea8c2 UBI: improve corrupted flash handling
This patch improves the way UBI handles corrupted flash, or flash
containing garbage or non-UBI data, which is the same from UBI POW.
Namely, we do the following:

* if 5% or more PEBs are corrupted, refuse the flash
* if less than 5% PEBs are corrupted, do not refuse the flash
  and format these PEBs
* if less than 8 PEBs are corrupted, format them silently, otherwise
  print a warning message.

Reported-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Tested-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
2010-06-04 11:30:44 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
33789fb9d4 UBI: introduce eraseblock counter variables
This is just a preparation patch which introduces several
'struct ubi_scan_info' fields which count eraseblocks of different
types. This will be used later on to decide whether it is safe to
format the flash or not. No functional changes so far.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Tested-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
2010-06-04 11:30:43 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
eb89580e1a UBI: introduce a new IO return code
This patch introduces the %UBI_IO_BAD_HDR_READ return code for
the I/O level function. We will use this code in order to distinguish
between "corrupted header possibly because this is non-ubi data" and
"corrupted header possibly because of real data corruption and ECC error".

So far this patch does not introduce any functional change, just a
preparation.

This patch is pased on a patch from
Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Tested-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
2010-06-04 11:30:42 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
786d783185 UBI: simplify IO error codes
We do not really need 2 separate error codes for indicating bad VID
and bad EC headers (UBI_IO_BAD_EC_HDR, UBI_IO_BAD_VID_HDR), it is
enough to have only one UBI_IO_BAD_HDR return code.

This patch does not introduce any functional change, only some
code simplification.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Reviewed-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Tested-by: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
2010-06-04 11:30:42 +03:00
Shinya Kuribayashi
3f5026222e UBI: fix s/then/than/ typos
Signed-off-by: Shinya Kuribayashi <shinya.kuribayashi.px@renesas.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-05-07 08:33:10 +03:00
Tejun Heo
5a0e3ad6af include cleanup: Update gfp.h and slab.h includes to prepare for breaking implicit slab.h inclusion from percpu.h
percpu.h is included by sched.h and module.h and thus ends up being
included when building most .c files.  percpu.h includes slab.h which
in turn includes gfp.h making everything defined by the two files
universally available and complicating inclusion dependencies.

percpu.h -> slab.h dependency is about to be removed.  Prepare for
this change by updating users of gfp and slab facilities include those
headers directly instead of assuming availability.  As this conversion
needs to touch large number of source files, the following script is
used as the basis of conversion.

  http://userweb.kernel.org/~tj/misc/slabh-sweep.py

The script does the followings.

* Scan files for gfp and slab usages and update includes such that
  only the necessary includes are there.  ie. if only gfp is used,
  gfp.h, if slab is used, slab.h.

* When the script inserts a new include, it looks at the include
  blocks and try to put the new include such that its order conforms
  to its surrounding.  It's put in the include block which contains
  core kernel includes, in the same order that the rest are ordered -
  alphabetical, Christmas tree, rev-Xmas-tree or at the end if there
  doesn't seem to be any matching order.

* If the script can't find a place to put a new include (mostly
  because the file doesn't have fitting include block), it prints out
  an error message indicating which .h file needs to be added to the
  file.

The conversion was done in the following steps.

1. The initial automatic conversion of all .c files updated slightly
   over 4000 files, deleting around 700 includes and adding ~480 gfp.h
   and ~3000 slab.h inclusions.  The script emitted errors for ~400
   files.

2. Each error was manually checked.  Some didn't need the inclusion,
   some needed manual addition while adding it to implementation .h or
   embedding .c file was more appropriate for others.  This step added
   inclusions to around 150 files.

3. The script was run again and the output was compared to the edits
   from #2 to make sure no file was left behind.

4. Several build tests were done and a couple of problems were fixed.
   e.g. lib/decompress_*.c used malloc/free() wrappers around slab
   APIs requiring slab.h to be added manually.

5. The script was run on all .h files but without automatically
   editing them as sprinkling gfp.h and slab.h inclusions around .h
   files could easily lead to inclusion dependency hell.  Most gfp.h
   inclusion directives were ignored as stuff from gfp.h was usually
   wildly available and often used in preprocessor macros.  Each
   slab.h inclusion directive was examined and added manually as
   necessary.

6. percpu.h was updated not to include slab.h.

7. Build test were done on the following configurations and failures
   were fixed.  CONFIG_GCOV_KERNEL was turned off for all tests (as my
   distributed build env didn't work with gcov compiles) and a few
   more options had to be turned off depending on archs to make things
   build (like ipr on powerpc/64 which failed due to missing writeq).

   * x86 and x86_64 UP and SMP allmodconfig and a custom test config.
   * powerpc and powerpc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * sparc and sparc64 SMP allmodconfig
   * ia64 SMP allmodconfig
   * s390 SMP allmodconfig
   * alpha SMP allmodconfig
   * um on x86_64 SMP allmodconfig

8. percpu.h modifications were reverted so that it could be applied as
   a separate patch and serve as bisection point.

Given the fact that I had only a couple of failures from tests on step
6, I'm fairly confident about the coverage of this conversion patch.
If there is a breakage, it's likely to be something in one of the arch
headers which should be easily discoverable easily on most builds of
the specific arch.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Guess-its-ok-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Lee Schermerhorn <Lee.Schermerhorn@hp.com>
2010-03-30 22:02:32 +09:00
Artem Bityutskiy
adbf05e3ec UBI: simplify debugging return codes
UBI debugging functions were a little bit over-engineered and
returned more error codes than needed, and the callers had to
do useless checks. Simplify the return codes.

Impact: only debugging code is affected, which means that for
        non-developers this is a no-op patch.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2010-02-01 15:16:37 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
2eadaad67b UBI: fix backward compatibility
Commit 32bc482028 did not fully fix
the backward compatibility issues. We still fail to properly handle
situations when the first PEB contains non-zero image sequence
number, but one of the following PEBs contains zero image sequence
number. For example, this may happen if we mount a new image with
an old kernel, and then try to mount it in the new kernel.

This patch should fix the issue.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-10-20 10:13:04 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
4a406856ea UBI: print a warning if too many PEBs are corrupted
There was a bug report recently where UBI prints:

UBI error: ubi_attach_mtd_dev: failed to attach by scanning, error -22

error messages and refuses to attach a PEB. It turned out to be a
buggy flash driver which returned garbage to almost every UBI read.
This patch makes UBI print a better message in such cases. Namely,
if UBI finds 8 or more corrupted PEBs, it prints a warning and
lists the corrupted PEBs.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-08-14 20:01:36 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
29a88c99d2 UBI: print a message if ECH is corrupted and VIDH is ok
If the EC header is corrupted, but the VID header is OK, UBI accepts the
PEB and treats it as "used". However, generally this should not happen.
Print a warning if this happens.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-08-14 20:01:35 +03:00
Adrian Hunter
32bc482028 UBI: compatible fallback in absense of sequence numbers
Fall back onto thinking everything's OK if either of the sequence
numbers we are asked to compare is zero, which is what was used
before sequence numbers were introduced.

[ Artem: modified the patch to be applicable to upstream UBI, added
        big comment ]

Signed-off-by: Adrian Hunter <ext-adrian.hunter@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Phil Carmody <ext-phil.2.carmody@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-07-24 20:08:52 +03:00
Holger Brunck
3dc948da78 UBI: fix bug in image sequence number handling
This patch fixes a bug in the image seq. number handling in the
scanning level. The assignment of the image_seq was incorrect.

Signed-off-by: Holger Brunck <holger.brunck@keymile.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-07-15 11:30:59 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
fe96efc1a3 UBI: nicify image sequence number handling
Move the image seq. number handling from I/O level to the scanning
lever, where it really belongs to. Move the @image_seq_set variable
to the @struct ubi_scan_info structure, which exists only during
scanning.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-07-05 18:47:08 +03:00
Adrian Hunter
0c6c7fa131 UBI: add image sequence number to EC header
An image sequence number is added to the UBI erase-counter header
to be able determine if the root file system contains a mixture
of old and new images (because the flashing failed to complete).

A change to nolo is also needed for this to take effect.

Signed-off-by: Adrian Hunter <adrian.hunter@nokia.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-07-05 18:47:07 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
3013ee31b6 UBI: use nicer 64-bit math
Get rid of 'do_div()' and use more user-friendly primitives from
'linux/math64.h'.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2009-01-18 14:27:44 +02:00
Frederik Schwarzer
025dfdafe7 trivial: fix then -> than typos in comments and documentation
- (better, more, bigger ...) then -> (...) than

Signed-off-by: Frederik Schwarzer <schwarzerf@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
2009-01-06 11:28:06 +01:00
Zoltan Sogor
b77bcb0789 UBI: fix EBADMSG handling
'ubi_io_read_data()' may return EBADMSG in case of an ECC error,
and we should not panic because of this. We have CRC32 checksum
and may check the data. So just ignore the EBADMSG error.

This patch also fixes a minor spelling error at the same time.

Signed-off-by: Zoltan Sogor <weth@inf.u-szeged.hu>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-11-06 11:13:02 +02:00
Julien Brunel
0e4a008a4f UBI: fix IS_ERR test
In case of error, the function add_volume returns an ERR pointer. The
result of IS_ERR, which is supposed to be used in a test as it is, is
here checked to be less than zero, which seems odd. We suggest to
replace this test by a simple IS_ERR test.

A simplified version of the semantic match that finds this problem is
as follows:
(http://www.emn.fr/x-info/coccinelle/)

// <smpl>
@def0@
expression x;
position p0;
@@
x@p0 = add_volume(...)

@protected@
expression def0.x,E;
position def0.p0;
position p;
statement S;
@@
x@p0
... when != x = E
if (!IS_ERR(x) && ...) {<... x@p ...>} else S

@unprotected@
expression def0.x,E;
identifier fld;
position def0.p0;
position p != protected.p;
@@
x@p0
... when != x = E
* x@p->fld
// </smpl>

Signed-off-by:  Julien Brunel <brunel@diku.dk>
Signed-off-by:  Julia Lawall <julia@diku.dk>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-09-26 19:24:37 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
9869cd801c UBI: remove pre-sqnum images support
Before UBI got into mainline, there was a slight flash format
change - we did not have sequence number support, then added it.

We have carried full support of those ancient images till this
moment. Now the support is removed, well, not fully removed.

Now UBI will support only _clean_ old images, which were cleanly
detached last time (just before kernel upgrade). This is most
likely the case.

But we will not support unclean ancient images. Surprisingly,
this allows us to remove a big chunk of legacy code.

And the same should be true for downgrading: clean images should
downgrade fine, but unclean ones will not.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:36:09 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
ebaaf1af3e UBI: fix kernel-doc errors and warnings
No functional changes, just tweak comments to make kernel-doc
work fine and stop complaining.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:36:09 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
9c9ec14770 UBI: fix checkpatch.pl errors and warnings
Just out or curiousity ran checkpatch.pl for whole UBI,
and discovered there are quite a few of stylistic issues.
Fix them.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:36:09 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
c8566350a3 UBI: fix and re-work debugging stuff
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:34:45 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
85c6e6e282 UBI: amend commentaries
Hch asked not to use "unit" for sub-systems, let it be so.
Also some other commentaries modifications.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-07-24 13:32:56 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
4bc1dca4b0 UBI: fix mean EC calculation
(a + b) / (c + d) != a / c + b / d. The old code errornously
assumed this incorrect formuld. Instead, just sum all erase
counters in a 64-bit variable and divide to the number of EBs
at the end.

Thanks to Adrian Hunter for pointing this out.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-04-19 20:49:41 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
91f2d53cd7 UBI: add layout volume information
Add more information about layout volume to make userspace tools
use the macros instead of constants. Also rename UBI_LAYOUT_VOL_ID
to make it consistent with other macros.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:25 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
c18a84186c UBI: fix warnings
Old gcc complains:

CC      drivers/mtd/ubi/wl.o
drivers/mtd/ubi/wl.c: In function 'wear_leveling_worker':
drivers/mtd/ubi/wl.c:746: warning: 'pe' may be used uninitialized in this function
CC      drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.o
drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c: In function 'ubi_scan':
drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c:772: warning: 'ec' may be used uninitialized in this function
drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c:772: note: 'ec' was declared here

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:25 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
64203195ed UBI: add sanity check
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:25 +02:00
Artem Bityutskiy
2f9270e7fe UBI: remove bogus assertion
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2008-01-25 16:41:25 +02:00
David Woodhouse
e3d18658d4 Merge branch 'master' of git://git.infradead.org/~dedekind/ubi-2.6 2007-10-14 14:29:00 +01:00
Artem Bityutskiy
e88d6e10e5 UBI: do not use vmalloc on I/O path
Similar reason as in case of the previous patch: it causes
deadlocks if a filesystem with writeback support works on top
of UBI. So pre-allocate needed buffers when attaching MTD device.
We also need mutexes to protect the buffers, but they do not
cause much contantion because they are used in recovery, torture,
and WL copy routines, which are called seldom.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:21 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
33818bbb84 UBI: allocate memory with GFP_NOFS
Use GFP_NOFS flag when allocating memory on I/O path, because otherwise
we may deadlock the filesystem which works on top of us. We observed
the deadlocks with UBIFS. Example:

VFS->FS lock a lock->UBI->kmalloc()->VFS writeback->FS locks the same
lock again.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:20 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
8bc2296196 UBI: fix sparse warnings
Fix "symbol shadows an earlier one" warnings. Although they are harmless
but it does not hurt to fix them and make sparse happy.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:20 +03:00
Florin Malita
dcec4c3bdc UBI: fix leak in ubi_scan_erase_peb
Coverity (1769) found the following problem: if the erase counter
overflow check triggers, ec_hdr is leaked.

Moving the allocation after the overflow check should take care of it.

Signed-off-by: Florin Malita <fmalita@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-10-14 13:10:20 +03:00
Mariusz Kozlowski
d9b0744d6c [UBI] drivers/mtd/ubi/scan.c: kmalloc + memset conversion to kzalloc
To be able to convert kmalloc + memset(..., 1, ...) to kzalloc this patch
reverses the logic around 'buf'.

Signed-off-by: Mariusz Kozlowski <m.kozlowski@tuxland.pl>
Signed-off-by: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
2007-08-01 11:04:05 +01:00
Artem Bityutskiy
2f3cdb55ee UBI: bugfix in max_sqnum calculation
Do not zero max_sqnum after a new volume has been found.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:58:02 +03:00
Brijesh Singh
76eafe479e UBI: bugfix in sqnum calculation
Hi,I came across problem of having two leb with same sequence no.This
happens when we continuously write one block again and again and reboot
machine before background thread erases those blocks.
The problem here was,when we find two blocks with same sequence no,we take
the higher one,but we were not updating max seq no,so next block may have
the same seqnum.
This patch solves this problem.

Signed-off-by: Brijesh Singh <brijesh.s.singh@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:57:52 +03:00
Christoph Hellwig
3261ebd7d4 UBI: kill homegrown endian macros
Kill UBI's homegrown endianess handling and replace it with
the standard kernel endianess handling.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:53:49 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
92ad8f3750 UBI: use vmalloc for large buffers
UBI allocates temporary buffers of PEB size, which may be 256KiB.
Use vmalloc instead of kmalloc for such big temporary buffers.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:53:08 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
79b510c0f2 UBI: add few more comments
Add few comments above ubi_scan_add_used() to explain why it is so
complex. Requested by Satyam Sharma <satyam.sharma@gmail.com>.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:53:00 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
941dfb07ed UBI: set correct gluebi device size
In case of static volumes, make emulated MTD device size to
be equivalent to data size, rather then volume size.

Reported-by: John Smith <john@arrows.demon.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:52:51 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
78d87c95b8 UBI: fix error path in create_vtbl()
There were several bugs in volume table creation error path. Thanks to
Satyam Sharma <satyam.sharma@gmail.com> and Florin Malita <fmalita@gmail.com>
for finding and analysing them: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/3/274

This patch makes ubi_scan_add_to_list() static and renames it to
add_to_list(), just because it is not needed outside scan.c anymore.

Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:52:32 +03:00
Artem Bityutskiy
341e1a0cf2 UBI: fix memory leak in checking code
Reported-by: Eric Sesterhenn / Snakebyte <snakebyte@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
2007-07-18 16:52:13 +03:00
Artem B. Bityutskiy
801c135ce7 UBI: Unsorted Block Images
UBI (Latin: "where?") manages multiple logical volumes on a single
flash device, specifically supporting NAND flash devices. UBI provides
a flexible partitioning concept which still allows for wear-levelling
across the whole flash device.

In a sense, UBI may be compared to the Logical Volume Manager
(LVM). Whereas LVM maps logical sector numbers to physical HDD sector
numbers, UBI maps logical eraseblocks to physical eraseblocks.

More information may be found at
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html

Partitioning/Re-partitioning

  An UBI volume occupies a certain number of erase blocks. This is
  limited by a configured maximum volume size, which could also be
  viewed as the partition size. Each individual UBI volume's size can
  be changed independently of the other UBI volumes, provided that the
  sum of all volume sizes doesn't exceed a certain limit.

  UBI supports dynamic volumes and static volumes. Static volumes are
  read-only and their contents are protected by CRC check sums.

Bad eraseblocks handling

  UBI transparently handles bad eraseblocks. When a physical
  eraseblock becomes bad, it is substituted by a good physical
  eraseblock, and the user does not even notice this.

Scrubbing

  On a NAND flash bit flips can occur on any write operation,
  sometimes also on read. If bit flips persist on the device, at first
  they can still be corrected by ECC, but once they accumulate,
  correction will become impossible. Thus it is best to actively scrub
  the affected eraseblock, by first copying it to a free eraseblock
  and then erasing the original. The UBI layer performs this type of
  scrubbing under the covers, transparently to the UBI volume users.

Erase Counts

  UBI maintains an erase count header per eraseblock. This frees
  higher-level layers (like file systems) from doing this and allows
  for centralized erase count management instead. The erase counts are
  used by the wear-levelling algorithm in the UBI layer. The algorithm
  itself is exchangeable.

Booting from NAND

  For booting directly from NAND flash the hardware must at least be
  capable of fetching and executing a small portion of the NAND
  flash. Some NAND flash controllers have this kind of support. They
  usually limit the window to a few kilobytes in erase block 0. This
  "initial program loader" (IPL) must then contain sufficient logic to
  load and execute the next boot phase.

  Due to bad eraseblocks, which may be randomly scattered over the
  flash device, it is problematic to store the "secondary program
  loader" (SPL) statically. Also, due to bit-flips it may become
  corrupted over time. UBI allows to solve this problem gracefully by
  storing the SPL in a small static UBI volume.

UBI volumes vs. static partitions

  UBI volumes are still very similar to static MTD partitions:

    * both consist of eraseblocks (logical eraseblocks in case of UBI
      volumes, and physical eraseblocks in case of static partitions;
    * both support three basic operations - read, write, erase.

  But UBI volumes have the following advantages over traditional
  static MTD partitions:

    * there are no eraseblock wear-leveling constraints in case of UBI
      volumes, so the user should not care about this;
    * there are no bit-flips and bad eraseblocks in case of UBI volumes.

  So, UBI volumes may be considered as flash devices with relaxed
  restrictions.

Where can it be found?

  Documentation, kernel code and applications can be found in the MTD
  gits.

What are the applications for?

  The applications help to create binary flash images for two purposes: pfi
  files (partial flash images) for in-system update of UBI volumes, and plain
  binary images, with or without OOB data in case of NAND, for a manufacturing
  step. Furthermore some tools are/and will be created that allow flash content
  analysis after a system has crashed..

Who did UBI?

  The original ideas, where UBI is based on, were developed by Andreas
  Arnez, Frank Haverkamp and Thomas Gleixner. Josh W. Boyer and some others
  were involved too. The implementation of the kernel layer was done by Artem
  B. Bityutskiy. The user-space applications and tools were written by Oliver
  Lohmann with contributions from Frank Haverkamp, Andreas Arnez, and Artem.
  Joern Engel contributed a patch which modifies JFFS2 so that it can be run on
  a UBI volume. Thomas Gleixner did modifications to the NAND layer. Alexander
  Schmidt made some testing work as well as core functionality improvements.

Signed-off-by: Artem B. Bityutskiy <dedekind@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Frank Haverkamp <haver@vnet.ibm.com>
2007-04-27 14:23:33 +03:00