nuttx/drivers/mtd/README.txt

MTD README
==========

  MTD stands for "Memory Technology Devices".  This directory contains
  drivers that operate on various memory technology devices and provide an
  MTD interface.  That MTD interface may then be used by higher level logic
  to control access to the memory device.

  See include/nuttx/mtd/mtd.h for additional information.

EEPROM
======
  EEPROMs are a form of Memory Technology Device (MTD).  EEPROMs are non-
  volatile memory like FLASH, but differ in underlying memory technology and
  differ in usage in many respects:  They may not be organized into blocks
  (at least from the standpoint of the user) and it is not necessary to
  erase the EEPROM memory before re-writing it.  In addition, EEPROMs tend
  to be much smaller than FLASH parts, usually only a few kilobytes vs
  megabytes for FLASH.  EEPROM tends to be used to retain a small amount of
  device configuration information; FLASH tends to be used for program or
  massive data storage. For these reasons, it may not be convenient to use
  the more complex MTD interface but instead use the simple character
  interface provided by the EEPROM drivers.  See drivers/eeprom.

NAND MEMORY
===========

  Files
  -----

  This directory also includes drivers for NAND memory.  These include:

    mtd_nand.c: The "upper half" NAND MTD driver
    mtd_nandecc.c, mtd_nandscheme.c, and hamming.c: Implement NAND software
      ECC
    mtd_onfi.c, mtd_nandmodel.c, and mtd_modeltab.c: Implement NAND FLASH
      identification logic.

  File Systems
  ------------

  NAND support is only partial in that there is no file system that works
  with it properly.  It should be considered a work in progress.  You will
  not want to use NAND unless you are interested in investing a little
  effort. See the STATUS section below.

    NXFFS
    -----

    The NuttX FLASH File System (NXFFS) works well with NOR-like FLASH
    but does not work well with NAND.  Some simple usability issues
    include:

      - NXFFS can be very slow.  The first time that you start the system,
        be prepared for a wait; NXFFS will need to format the NAND volume.
        I have lots of debug on so I don't yet know what the optimized wait
        will be.  But with debug ON, software ECC, and no DMA the wait is
        in many tens of minutes (and substantially  longer if many debug
        options are enabled.

      - On subsequent boots, after the NXFFS file system has been created
        the delay will be less.  When the new file system is empty, it will
        be very fast.  But the NAND-related boot time can become substantial
        whenthere has been a lot of usage of the NAND.  This is because
        NXFFS needs to scan the NAND device and build the in-memory dataset
        needed to access NAND and there is more that must be scanned after
        the device has been used.  You may want tocreate a separate thread at
        boot time to bring up NXFFS so that you don't delay the boot-to-prompt
        time excessively in these longer delay cases.

      - There is another NXFFS related performance issue:  When the FLASH
        is fully used, NXFFS will restructure the entire FLASH, the delay
        to restructure the entire FLASH will probably be even larger.  This
        solution in this case is to implement an NXFSS clean-up daemon that
        does the job a little-at-a-time so that there is no massive clean-up
        when the FLASH becomes full.

    But there is a more serious, showstopping problem with NXFFS and NAND:

      - Bad NXFFS behavior with NAND:  If you restart NuttX, the files that
        you wrote to NAND will be gone.  Why?  Because the multiple writes
        have corrupted the NAND ECC bits.  See STATUS below.  NXFFS would
        require a major overhaul to be usable with NAND.

    There are a few reasons whay NXFFS does not work with NAND. NXFFS was
    designed to work with NOR-like FLASH and NAND differs from other that
    FLASH model in several ways.  For one thing, NAND requires error
    correction (ECC) bytes that must be set in order to work around bit
    failures.  This affects NXFFS in two ways:

     - First, write failures are not fatal. Rather, they should be tried by
       bad blocks and simply ignored.  This is because unrecoverable bit
       failures will cause read failures when reading from NAND.  Setting
       the CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL+CONFIG_NXFFS_NAND option will enable this
       behavior.

       [CONFIG_NXFFS_NAND is only available is CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL is also
        selected.]

     - Secondly, NXFFS will write a block many times.  It tries to keep
       bits in the erased state and assumes that it can overwrite those bits
       to change them from the erased to the non-erased state.  This works
       will with NOR-like FLASH.  NAND behaves this way too.  But the
       problem with NAND is that the ECC bits cannot be re-written in this
       way.  So once a block has been written, it cannot be modified.  This
       behavior has NOT been fixed in NXFFS.  Currently, NXFFS will attempt
       to re-write the ECC bits causing the ECC to become corrupted because
       the ECC bits cannot be overwritten without erasing the entire block.

     This may prohibit NXFFS from ever being used with NAND.

    FAT
    ---

    Another option is FAT.  FAT can be used if the Flast Translation Layer
    (FTL) is enabled.  FTL converts the NAND MTD interface to a block driver
    that can then be used with FAT.

    FAT, however, will not handle bad blocks and does not perform any wear
    leveling.  So you can bring up a NAND file system with FAT and a new,
    clean NAND FLASH but you need to know that eventually, there will be
    NAND bit failures and FAT will stop working: If you hit a bad block,
    then FAT is finished.  There is no mechanism in place in FAT not to
    mark and skip over bad blocks.

    FTL writes are also particularly inefficient with NAND.  In order to
    write a sector, FTL will read the entire erase block into memory, erase
    the block on FLASH, modify the sector and re-write the erase block back
    to FLASH.  For large NANDs this can be very inefficient.  For example,
    I am currently using nand with a 128KB erase block size and 2K page size
    so each write can cause a 256KB data transfer!

    NOTE that there is some caching logic within FAT and FTL so that this
    cached erase block can be re-used if possible and writes will be
    deferred as long as possible.

    SMART FS
    --------

    I have not yet tried SmartFS.  It does support some wear-leveling
    similar to NXFFS, but like FAT, cannot handle bad blocks and like NXFFS,
    it will try to re-write erased bits.  So SmartFS is not really an
    option either.

    What is Needed
    --------------

    What is needed to work with FAT properly would be another MTD layer
    between the FTL layer and the NAND FLASH layer.  That layer would
    perform bad block detection and sparing so that FAT works transparently
    on top of the NAND.

    Another, less general, option would be support bad blocks within FAT.
    Such a solution migh be possible for SLC NAND, but would not be
    sufficiently general for all NAND types.