Re: BootLDR, FLASH and progress?

On Sunday 30 May 2004 17:41, Nils Faerber wrote:
> I cannot answer your questions, sorry, but I can relieve you from your
> doubts about wearing out your flash. If it is kernel development you are
> concerned of then you will be very unlikely to wear out any flash sector
> soon.
> You have about 100.000 guaranteed erase/write cycles on NOR flash. Given
> your flashing process only takes one minute, which is a very positive
> asumption, then you could repeatedly reflash your SIMpad for about 1666
> hours, which is almost 70 days - doing only flashing, no booting or
> testing!
> I doubt seriously that you will ever achieve this ;)
Anyway I think it is already enough 'risk' to do kernel + oe work as it puts 
more 'load' on the device and quite differs from normal operations. And 
measuring the amount of givers and takers nowadays in FreeSoftware I'm quite 
sure if my simpad breaks I can't afford a new one for sure let a lone the 
components I would like to play with ( Serial keyboard, CF VGA card ).
Anyway using NFS or booting from CF can save a lot of time anyway :) 
Ok then stay tuned for SIMpad 2.6 oe images ( the little amount of givers made 
it possible for me to get a new machine Athlon XP 2600+ :) )


>
> What can wear out flash pretty easily is using the wrong tools, e.g. a
> wrong filesystem. A regular ext2/ext3 filesystem in flash without any
> extra options (like noatime) will kill your flash within days... :)

I was aware of ext3 issues with the fixed place of the journal but what with 
ext2? The superblock + backup super blocks or  Inode List at fixed position?

anyway thanks.


regards holger

-- 
_____________________________________________
Holger 'zecke' Freyther
Project OPIE- the Open Palmtop Integrated Environment
http://opie.handhelds.org 
Sponsor me! Donate Hardware!
http://handhelds.org/~zecke


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