UBIFS


atomicthumbs

I am the king of the collectors, with hospital bed
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The flash-based UBIFS filesystem looks like a good idea to use on the Pandora's internal memory, as long as it's an MTD device. It offers a bunch of advatages over other similar flash filesystems, like on-the-fly compression/decompression, fast mount times, fast I/O (the writing bit doesn't really matter, though), and tolerance for unclean reboots.

Is this a possibility for use with the Pandora's internal flash? I can see it speeding up the firmware loading and boot times. In addition, support for UBIFS has been added in 2.6.27.
 
atomicthumbs said:
Mithrildor said:
If it gets ported for the Pandora yes. You can change what is on the internal memory.

That's not what I'm talking about. Please re-read my post.


And please don't keep replying to posts if you don't know what your talking about.
 
UBIFS is actually quite interesting. It'll start showing up in newer Linux kernels soon, and it could definitely be used instead of jffs2, the way I understand it.

JFFS2 works directly on the MTD layer, as a filesystem with compression and wear leveling (unlike e.g. SD cards there is no built-in wear leveling on the NAND flash in the omap chipset).
UBIFS is a compressed filesystem that works on top of UBI which sits between the filesystem and the MTD layer. UBI does the wear leveling part, so UBIFS doesn't have to.

So there are similarities, and I don't see why one shouldn't be able to use UBIFS on the NAND flash in the future if you want to. Just get a new enough kernel (possibly with patches), build it with the drivers you need, and off you go. What I don't know about the Pandora is how the internal flash is supposed to be initially updated, on the Nokia tablets you use an external flasher programs that works over USB. Maybe on the Pandora it can be done directly (boot from SD, and go) - but I don't know enough about accessing NAND.
 
Sounds cool. As long as u-boot supports it, it ought to be doable, right? It's probably a bit late in the game to be used on the first units shipped though.
 
Uboot doesn't even need to support it. You can always make a separate ext2 boot partition and put the kernel there.
 
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