[Gta04-owner] NAND behavior while flashing qtmoko

[Radek Polak]

On Sunday 25 March 2012 17:12:21 Michele Brocco wrote:

> just want to report some experiences while flashing qtmoko to NAND:
> 
> - first, why has the qtmoko kernel a hardcoded path for the rootfs?
> Why doesn't it get the parameters from u-boot?

It's quite hard to troubleshoot problems if everyone used different boot 
params. I am using the same boot cmdline as Neil Brown's kernel. I am not 
kernel developer and i believe that he has got them right.

> - qtmoko only seems to boot correctly if the kernel is flashed from qtmoko
> - qtmoko from nand just seem to boot correctly from jffs2 when linux
> is booted correctly once from mmc, otherwise i get filesystem/mtd
> errors and qtmoko is not booted.
> 
> did anyone experience the same issues?

Yes, i did. Now with ubifs it's even more evident and even the trick with 
"boot from sd first" does not work. I very often get to the state where 
ubiattach reports many bad earase blocks. But this is not possible - i have 
used the flash just a few times. Then it either boots the ubifs with readonly 
mode or with many file errors. So i reboot a few times and it works again 
nicely. I even got to the situation where i couldnt reflash nand with new 
image. But then after reboot it worked again just fine. I think we need some 
more time to understand what is happening.

Anyways, i'd recommend buying big and fast class 10 uSD card and use NAND just 
for unpacking release tarbals. There is IMO now not much use for NAND when you 
can use fast, cheap, large and reliable SD card.

And btw if you start using initramfs (default since qtmoko v42), you can even 
have any number of distributions on single SD card partition.

Regards

Radek