General issues regarding F2FS rootfs partition


@God Ginrai - We got the microSDXC slot built in. Having to hold a shoulder button on a handheld console to 'activate it' for booting is a very tiny price to pay to have it exist. So, ahem, quitcherbitchin.

1. If you're at the least bit concerned about retaining a set of files, make a 2nd copy to a 2nd drive/disk/media in the same device or use RAID 10.
2. If you're more than a bit concerned about retaining a set of files, make a 3rd copy on a piece of media held in a fireproof safe or safety deposit box completely separate from any device.
3. If you're really concerned about retaining a set of files, make 3 offline copies, rotate through them to create your backup set and store them in three separate offline storage locations.

Cloud storage is fine for -sharing- files. I wouldn't trust any cloud service to keep files -safe- though. Anyone who only keeps only one copy of important files AND stores them on a mobile device is simply asking for heartache.
 
Samsung and sandisk have been faked. I think tosiba has some arrangement, they did partner in making flash
How long a nand will live depends a whole lot on how many bits/cell,, ie,
SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC..... SLC, barring mischance will live for a very long time, long past the device becoming a curio
MLC has a reasonable life, the others rather less. Often, on a better SD the first few megs are SLC, for fat and / directory
Actually, a lot of the quality of the device is in the controller, not only do you have no idea what it is doing,
but it is very hard to find ANY information, they seem to be "trust me".
Well, most people are ignorant enough that may valid, with the remapping and garbage collection
you have absolutely no idea what is happening on the nand
 
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Phlyra said:
Oh? I thought they were really thin - is the space inside that constrained?! :confused:
Nah I’ll just use a USB SSD like the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX.
Click to expand...
youre typical NVMe SSD M.2 format will be 22mm by 80 mm up to 110 mm long and will be 3.8mm thick , as has been said i dont think the PCIe lines are exposed for use plus there is not that much room inside the Pyra.

i have a generic 128 MB SD card i have been using for firmware updates for the last 12 years and it was a hand me down from the previous tech. i honestly couldnt tell you how many times it has been formatted and had files written and deleted from it in all those years. it still works but is too small for the newest firmwares i have to update. i was doing it in 2 passes. we have machines that are 10 years old and all the data and user data is on flash/NVRam type devices.. not ever had to replace one.
 
MLC came out about 5-6 years ago. Anything older is SLC, may last until lost or discarded
 
It amazes me a bit how many obviously fake microSD and SD cards there are on Amazon - many with Prime free shipping where Amazon is shipping them from their own warehouse. Yes - they are someone else's stock not SOLD by Amazon, but shipped by Amazon. Of all the flaky crap that gets sold, this seems to me to be the easiest one to, 'clean up', but they persist. They leave it up to the consumer to be able to distinguish between the two - and tend to make it less than obvious. Annoying.

So, there is a lot of 'buyer beware' still regarding media cards.
 
Grench said:
It amazes me a bit how many obviously fake microSD and SD cards there are on Amazon - many with Prime free shipping where Amazon is shipping them from their own warehouse. Yes - they are someone else's stock not SOLD by Amazon, but shipped by Amazon. Of all the flaky crap that gets sold, this seems to me to be the easiest one to, 'clean up', but they persist. They leave it up to the consumer to be able to distinguish between the two - and tend to make it less than obvious. Annoying.

So, there is a lot of 'buyer beware' still regarding media cards.
Click to expand...
Which ones are “obviously fake”, which “less than obvious” and which ones actually genuine?
 
Well, as Grench said, it's up to the buyer to distinguish between them. There are programs to help, largely ones that detect cards that pretend to be bigger than they are, so if you fill them with enough data they overwrite earlier pages. But if it's got a duff controller that doesn't remap broken bits then it'll have dramatically shorter lifespan, and I don't know of a way to detect that other than using it for a few months.
 
Phlyra said:
Which ones are “obviously fake”, which “less than obvious” and which ones actually genuine?
Click to expand...
I'm not going to provide links to fake cards. Just search Amazon for 1TB microSDXC. Any of the results that are not Sandisk cards and/or are being sold for under $150 are obvious fakes.

Likely genuine are the cards sold by Amazon. Example of a likely genuine (no guarantee on this) card:
Code: 
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-microSDXC-Memory-Adapter/dp/B07P9W5HJV
To check if an item is sold by Amazon and not just them shipping someone else's stock, you need to click on the link under the item description that will be something like:
"New (5) from $259.99 + FREE Shipping"
That should pull up a menu of the sellers of the item -and- show you which of the nested listings is actually sold by Amazon.

Amazon used to include the seller's identification in the product listing but has since moved it to this secondary page - a bit off obfuscation. That is one small additional issue combined with their seemingly purposely broken search has me rather annoyed with their behavior. Still, Amazon, when they are selling the item themselves, have been a solid source for media cards for me. I have a 1TB SanDisk microSDXC for another project and it seems to be genuine. I put 800GB of data on it and binary cross compared it back to source.

If you don't need the capacity or you're not wanting to splurge for the 1TB cards, there are bargains to be found on the SanDisk 200GB and 400GB cards sometimes. I have a half dozen of each (again - other projects) and have found them to be pretty solid cards.
 
Grench said:
I'm not going to provide links to fake cards. Just search Amazon for 1TB microSDXC. Any of the results that are not Sandisk cards and/or are being sold for under $150 are obvious fakes.

Likely genuine are the cards sold by Amazon. Example of a likely genuine (no guarantee on this) card:
Code: 
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-microSDXC-Memory-Adapter/dp/B07P9W5HJV
To check if an item is sold by Amazon and not just them shipping someone else's stock, you need to click on the link under the item description that will be something like:
"New (5) from $259.99 + FREE Shipping"
That should pull up a menu of the sellers of the item -and- show you which of the nested listings is actually sold by Amazon.

Amazon used to include the seller's identification in the product listing but has since moved it to this secondary page - a bit off obfuscation. That is one small additional issue combined with their seemingly purposely broken search has me rather annoyed with their behavior. Still, Amazon, when they are selling the item themselves, have been a solid source for media cards for me. I have a 1TB SanDisk microSDXC for another project and it seems to be genuine. I put 800GB of data on it and binary cross compared it back to source.

If you don't need the capacity or you're not wanting to splurge for the 1TB cards, there are bargains to be found on the SanDisk 200GB and 400GB cards sometimes. I have a half dozen of each (again - other projects) and have found them to be pretty solid cards.
Click to expand...
Cheers for the clarification, very helpful!
 
Anytime you get a "new" card in your hand, the 1st thing you should do,
WITHOUT FAIL, is test to see if fake
f3, I use f3probe,, sudo f3probe /dev/sdX ,, be sure to get X right
then, to see how fast,, (within mounted card)
iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2
for winblows, there is htestw (for size, fake)
 
Yes, that's the tool I was thinking of. It proved a key shaped 8GB card I bought was really 8GB, but it couldn't protect against the card dumping it's first page of data after a few weeks of being carried about in my wallet.

Grench said:
Amazon used to include the seller's identification in the product listing but has since moved it to this secondary page - a bit off obfuscation. That is one small additional issue combined with their seemingly purposely broken search has me rather annoyed with their behavior. Still, Amazon, when they are selling the item themselves, have been a solid source for media cards for me.
Click to expand...

I used to be able to select 'Free UK delivery via Amazon' on the amazon-dot-uk. Since then they've introduced 'sponsored' items that I couldn't figure out, which now seems to have been supplanted by 'from our brands' products, but they smell wrong to me still so I still skip those. And now it shows things fulfulled by amazon which are some of the dodgy sellers you talk about which you can distinguish, but if you click thorough then click through to sellers, quite often there's product which amazon themselves are selling is there for a few fivers more, but yeah you have to click twice after the search ending up with three different pages to find that out these days.
 
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aTc said:
All that stuff is a bit behind, since i changed the way images are built.
Currently working on getting everything back to the way i want it to function.
(installing to emmc, and automatically resizing sd cards)
Click to expand...
Sorry to necropost, but can this still be used? I'm having issues with the test33.img producing a partition that is too small.
 
I've got a test image that will resize the partition to fill the sd card.


unpack, and write the image to an sd card with any disk image writer.

On first boot it will resize the partition, it will show a message that it will take a few minutes.
When it's done, it will show a message to press a key to shut down.

Shut down the pyra, then start it again. This time it will go into the first boot wizard as normal.

It worked on mine, but since it's experimental, don't blame me if you lose all your data :)
 
It won't write to emmc.
And since that partition is created at max. size already , even if the script would accidentally try to resize the emmc , nothing would really happen.
Also, it only resizes if it finds a file named "pyra-resize" on the partition ,to be extra safe
 
aTc said:
It won't write to emmc.
And since that partition is created at max. size already , even if the script would accidentally try to resize the emmc , nothing would really happen.
Also, it only resizes if it finds a file named "pyra-resize" on the partition ,to be extra safe
Click to expand...
Yay! I will give this a try.
 
It doesn't work, unfortunately. The resizing works, and it boots, but it freezes completely at the end of the first run wizard.
 
@Silent-Hunter

After the freeze, reboot from emmc, insert SDcard

Inside rootfs (on sdcard) create first-run.done file in /var/lib/pyra/

Reboot to sdcard, run dpkg-reconfigure locales

For reference first run script is in /usr/share/pyra/scripts

YMMV I have sucessfully booted to a 128GB card with all space available.
 
Is this already a necropost ?
Anyway... Just got my pyra, dd-ed the latest image to an sdcard and found out that f2fs really means pain.

no-gos:
- It cannot be resized online.
- When trying to resize offline it seems you only can resize it to "certain offsets"...otherwise you will get something like this.
Device size is not sufficient for F2FS volume, more segment needed =3864
- If you hit the correct offset (after randomly trying to reach =0 ...
- e.g. sudo parted /dev/mmcblk0 resizepart 2 42.55G
- sudo resize.f2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
- ... the filesystem is broken an cannot be repaired.
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 /mnt mount: /mnt: mount(2) system call failed: Structure needs cleaning.

ext4 or xfs are so much more reliable... We should change this.
 
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