* Jun OKAJIMA okajima@digitalinfra.co.jp [061023 10:52]:
I suppose that anybody here would know the name of Robson, Intel's HDD cache on flash mem. But, somebody dont know the detail of it?
Apparently it is supposed to be used by the operating system as a hard drive cache replacement to allow hard drives to spin down
I have an interest in the spec about logical format of the flash mems. I mean, they would have parition table and something like FAT table or such, and what is the format?
on a hardware layer it is a NAND flash, so it can theoretically be used with MTD in Linux.
Is there any real hardware with "Robson" out there? I know several systems (including those running LinuxBIOS, like the OLPC) have NAND flash for storage _instead_ of a hard drive.
Where is "Robson" supposed to live? on the hard drive? on the mainboard?
Why I want to know it? Because, I guess we can use the flash for putting Linux BIOS there.
At least for the payload this might be interesting, indeed. Are there any specs available for an actual hw implementation of Robson?
And it is better that Linux BIOS partition can co-exist Robson cache partition. This is the reason I am curious about the logical format.
The logical format might very well be different depending on the OS you are using from what I can tell?
Is there any OS that will actually use this? Is there any hardware that has this?
If this is possible, we will not have to worry about the space shortage issue ( 256KB is small for linux bios) anymore. And it is also easy to "multi-boot" both normal BIOS and Linux BIOS, like ADLO.
EFI will bring us at least 8mbit of flash on most boards in the future as well :-) Intel is about to log-roll... ;-)
Stefan