Martin Langhoff wrote: > On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 11:27 AM, Mitch Bradley <[email protected]> wrote: > >> To solve a hard problem to the level where you can ship the result >> requires money >> > > Not particularly controversial with me at least. The community is made > of many interests, and the commercial interests are a significant > part. Big tent and all of that. > > The corollary here I guess is that there isn't significant money in > the advantage that an "open stack" FTL would provide, at least now. >
Not only is there insufficient money, there is negative economic incentive for the open FTL, given that you have to go out of your way to try and (probably not) find a suitable raw-NAND controller. You have no cost-effective deployment platform. > I wonder whether the Flash vendors that fail to "win" in the FTL > driven market you (convincingly) describe will open up a bit, offering > a lower cost raw-access device, one that will only be usable with a > passable wearlevelling-smart FS. > The raw-access device will not be cheaper, because any possible (small) savings in silicon area will be overwhelmed by the lower-volume factor. The managed-NAND solution will "lock in". The losing controller vendors will either get their act together for this or the next chip generation, or get out of that business. > Yes, but other buyers are testing (and bargaining with vendors) each > on their own. Granted, if you are smarter buying your Flash device, > you have a market advantage. > A distinction must be made between system vendors and jellybean-storage vendors. The system vendors (e.g. netbook brands) will move quickly to the good parts, because there are only a few factories that make all the different brands. Word and successful recipes get around fast in that world. At the jellybean level it will take a bit longer, but once the controller vendors get the recipe down, the jellybean storage market will pick up the good controllers. There are only a few controller vendors, and market pressure from the system level is forcing them all to get their act together. Once you get your firmware right, you ship the good version to everybody going forward. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
