The problem: NAND flashes have different amount of initial bad physical
eraseblocks (marked as bad by the manufacturer). For example, for 256MiB
Samsung OneNAND flash there might be from 0 to 40 bad initial eraseblocks,
which is about 2%. When UBI is used as the base system, one needs to know
the exact amount of good physical eraseblocks, because this number is
needed to create the UBI image which is put to the devices during
production. But this number is not know, which forces us to use the
minimum number of good physical eraseblocks. And UBI additionally
reserves some percentage of physical eraseblocks for bad block handling
(default is 1%), so we have 1-3% of PEBs reserved at the end, depending
on the amount of initial bad PEBs. But it is desired to always have
1% (or more, depending on the configuration).
Solution: this patch adds an "auto-resize" flag to the volume table.
The volume which has the "auto-resize" flag will automatically be re-sized
(enlarged) on the first UBI initialization. UBI clears the flag when
the volume is re-sized. Only one volume may have the "auto-resize" flag.
So, the production UBI image may have one volume with "auto-resize"
flag set, and its size is automatically adjusted on the first boot
of the device.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
This slab cache is not really needed since the number of objects
is low and the constructor does not make much sense because we
allocate oblects when doint I/O, which is way slower then allocation.
Suggested-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
When creating a new volume, do not forget to increment the
vol_count variable.
Also, users are not interested in internal volumes, so do not show
them in the volumes_count sysfs file.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
UBI allows to specify MTD device name or number when the module is being
loaded. When parsing MTD device identity string, it first tries to treat
it as device NAME, and if that fails, it treats it as device number.
Make it vice-versa as this is more logical and makes less troubles when
you have an MTD device named "1" and try to load mtd1 which has different
name. This is especially easy to hit when gluebi is enabled.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Introduce a separate mutex which serializes volumes checking,
because we cammot really use volumes_mutex - it cases reverse
locking problems with mtd_tbl_mutex when gluebi is used -
thanks to lockdep.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Prepare the attach and detach functions to by used outside of
module initialization:
* detach function checks reference count before detaching
* it kills the background thread as well
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
This is one more step on the way to "removable" UBI devices. It
adds reference counting for UBI devices. Every time a volume on
this device is opened - the device's refcount is increased. It
is also increased if someone is reading any sysfs file of this
UBI device or of one of its volumes.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
This patch is a preparation to make UBI devices dynamic. It
adds an UBI control device which has dynamically allocated
major number and registers itself as "ubi_ctrl". It does not
do anything so far. The idea is that this device will allow
to attach/detach MTD devices from userspace.
This is symilar to what the Linux device mapper has.
The next things to do are:
* Fix UBI, because it now assumes UBI devices cannot go away
* Implement control device ioctls which will attach/detach MTD
devices
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
If we fail halfway through sysfs file creation, we may just call
sysfs remove function and it will delete all the files we created.
For non-existing files it will also be OK - the remove functions
just return -ENOENT.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Pass volume description object to the EBA function which makes
more sense, and EBA function do not have to find the volume
description object by volume ID.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Similarly to ltree_entry_slab, it makes more sense to create
and destroy ubi_wl_entry slab on module initialization/exit.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Since the ltree_entry slab cache is a global entity, which is
used by all UBI devices, it is more logical to create it on
module initialization time and destro on module exit time.
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
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>
Increase UBI devices couter after the message, not before.
Signed-off-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
Replacing (n & (n-1)) in the context of power of 2 checks
with is_power_of_2
Signed-off-by: Vignesh Babu <vignesh.babu@wipro.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
ubi->vtbl is allocated using vmalloc() in vtbl.c empty_create_lvol(),
but it is freed in build.c with kfree()
Signed-off-by: Vinit Agnihotri <vinit.agnihotri@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@nokia.com>
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>
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>
