> Wish I knew how to create drivers for OFW so it could boot from UBIFS. > >
Normally I would encourage adding such drivers to OFW, but in this case I think it's wasted effort that could be much better spent in other ways. a) XO OFW already has well-elaborated partition support. It's interaction with the security mechanism is understood. The NANDblaster tool for recovery and mass update supports it fully. b) No new official OFW releases for the XO-1 are in the pipeline, as the customers are happy with the latest one. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't do one if necessary, but rather that, lacking the necessity, we prefer to focus our resources on the new hardware. Of course, one could always install a custom firmware image, but that would make migration more difficult and thus hamper the adoption of an ubifs-based OS image. c) There is enough work to do already for migrating to ubifs without adding the unnecessary work of implementing, testing, and stabilizing the firmware support for ubifs. d) The long-term value of having ubifs support in the OFW source tree is questionable, since raw NAND is on the way out, industry-wide. There are several reasons: (1) New NAND chips are sprouting wider and wider ECC making the error detection infeasible except for specialized interface chips (2) The engineering effort of supporting the variations among raw NAND chips at the system level is becoming prohibitive (3) The price crossover has already happened in some cases - you can buy packaged "managed NAND" (e.g. SD cards or modules) for less than the price of individual chips. (The economics includes not only the cost of producing the chips, but also inventory costs, supply chain logistics, factory scheduling, long-term vs. short-term pricing, the ability to buy chips from different sources, and who pays for the cost of qualifying different sources). Looking to the future, it would be much more useful to add a btrfs driver to OFW. ubifs, nice as it is, came along near the end of life of the problem it solves. btrfs, on the other hand, is widely believed to be the Next Big Thing. If someone wants to undertake a btrfs project for OFW, I'll be glad to assist. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel