This is the mail archive of the
ecos-discuss@sourceware.org
mailing list for the eCos project.
Re: NAND for STM32, YAFFS and UFFS
- From: Ross Younger <wry at ecoscentric dot com>
- To: Simon Kallweit <simon dot kallweit at intefo dot ch>
- Cc: eCos Disuss <ecos-discuss at ecos dot sourceware dot org>
- Date: Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:05:26 +0100
- Subject: Re: [ECOS] NAND for STM32, YAFFS and UFFS
- References: <4A4B771F.1060804@intefo.ch>
Hi Simon,
I added NAND support for the STM3210E-EVAL board today. I currently use
Ross's framework [...]
Glad to hear it, thanks for giving the code a try :-)
which is rather important for me at the moment. The port consists of the
HAL part as well as a new ST NANDxxxx3A NAND driver. Both were started
as copies of Ross's code.
This was my clear intention from the start; whilst clone+hack is often
frowned upon, in this sort of situation it keeps the individual driver size
down. Perhaps over time we might put together some more generic chip drivers.
What is still missing is interrupt mode and
the usage of STM32's onboard ECC computation unit.
Interrupt mode adds a nontrivial overhead; if your application isn't
multi-threaded, it won't win you anything, and in any event it the overhead
will make your accesses slower overall (though won't hit the CPU in
polling). As ever, the trade-off is yours to make, which is why it's an
explicit CDL option.
I have been benchmarking parts of my setup this week and found - rather
unsurprisingly - that the overheads are pretty punishing. The chip on the EA
board takes 25us to read a page, 300-700us to write a page, and 2-3ms to
erase a block. I'm finding that interrupt mode on that board is adding about
a millisecond to every NAND call, which adds up fast. (There are 65,536
pages on this chip, and an exhaustive scan of a nearly-full YAFFS fs has to
read most of them.)
It's clear that it's just not worth doing interrupt mode for reads on this
particular board; writes maybe, and erases are clearly worth it. I will be
disabling interrupt mode for reads in the EA2468 driver very shortly and I
would advise you to consider whether the situation on the STM3210E is
similar 8-)
As for ECC, it should hopefully be straightforward for you to add an ECC
"driver" which will plug right on in in place of the Linux MTD algorithm.
The MTD ECC code is 3 bytes ECC per 256 bytes of data; if the onboard is a
different size, you will also need to add a new OOB layout definition in
nand_oob.c. (I got mine by reading the Linux MTD code.) If you don't need to
interoperate with anything else, the MTD alg may be suitable, but of course
if code space is really tight for you, you might prefer to use the onboard
ECC and add a CDL option to not compile nand_ecc_mtd.c.
I wanted to do some quick tests with YAFFS, as my initial port of the
UFFS filesystem is not yet done, and I wanted to get some rough numbers
of what resources are needed to run YAFFS. Unfortunately it turned out
that the YAFFS port does not handle small page NANDs, as one is found on
the STM32 evalboard. Further investigation showed that YAFFS1 was using
small page NANDs and YAFFS2 is used on 1k++ page NANDs. The eCos port is
based on YAFFS2 I guess, so I think this should be renamed properly. Or
was there a plan to support both YAFFS1 and YAFFS2?
There's a bit of a potential for terminology confusion here, so I shall
digress briefly in the hopes that it's useful for people not following this
debate so closely... In Aleph One's CVS repo, there are two distinct modules
`yaffs' and `yaffs2'. The former only supports small-page, and is obsolete;
the latter is effectively a patched version which supports both small- and
large-page devices. Confusingly, internally to the code, `YAFFS1' refers to
the small-page support and `YAFFS2' the large-page. Personally, I consider
there to be one YAFFS with two tentacles.
I have been working only with the yaffs2 source base. However, as I have
only been working with its large-page support (YAFFS2), I have compiled out
the small-page (YAFFS1) support meantime, and only written large-page NAND
hooks. This leaves a small gap waiting to be bridged.
Off the top of my head, what's needed to make the small-page code work is:
* to add a switch somewhere to tell eyaffs_mount() to set up the device
struct as YAFFS1 instead of YAFFS2;
* to provide the couple of YAFFS1 NAND access functions which I haven't yet
(prototypes for which exist in ecos-yaffs-nand.c);
* to unset CONFIG_YAFFS_NO_YAFFS1 in ecos-yaffs.h (perhaps make
YAFFS1/YAFFS2 modes properly CDL-switchable);
* to add in the "missing" files from the yaffs2 distribution (just
yaffs_packedtags1.[ch], I think).
As it happens I believe we do have an STM3210E somewhere here, so I will
probably end up looking into this myself in due course, but it rather looks
like I'm going to be distracted by commercial concerns for the next couple
of weeks :-(
You mention that RAM is tight, I should raise a flag about YAFFS memory
usage. My benchmarking this week provided a rather alarming result. Buried
in YAFFS's own documents is the suggestion that one should budget two bytes
of RAM per page of NAND for YAFFS's internal data structures. Now, the chip
on the EA board is 1024 blocks x 64 pages per block, i.e. 65536 pages total
(x 2kbytes each, for a 128Mbyte chip) - so by the rule of thumb one would
expect to budget 128Kbytes. Worryingly, after I had written 10,000 small
files into YAFFS, my heap usage as discerned from mallinfo() was around
1.6Mbyte! (I need to investigate this more; it's next on my plate after
sorting out the timings. However I am pretty sure there is no memory leak,
as the heap usage went to zero after umount.) I am in the process of
composing a post to the YAFFS mailing list raising this and will see what
the folks there say.
After some first investigation of the UFFS source code it seems that it
needs quite a bit of work to make it work properly with eCos and not
have hacks all over the place. But it seems that YAFFS does still use
too much resources for our usage, so I think I need to work on a simpler
one and UFFS still looks like a good start ...
By the way, I'm still working on that proposal I mentioned here the other
day to let RedBoot use NAND as its FIS (by pretending it's a funny flavour
of NOR). While that won't be directly of use for you, it might prove
adaptable as a very very simple FS. But, so many things to do, so little time...
Regards,
Ross
--
eCosCentric Ltd, Barnwell House, Barnwell Drive, Cambridge CB5 8UU, UK
Registered in England no. 4422071. www.ecoscentric.com
--
Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos
and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss