[coreboot] FILO creating filo.conf

[Joseph Smith]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:39:29 -0700, ebiederm at xmission.com (Eric W.
Biederman) wrote:
> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.devel.2006 at gmx.net> writes:
> 
>> On 15.09.2008 22:32, Joseph Smith wrote:
>>> On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:17:11 -0500, Alex Mauer <hawke at hawkesnest.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Some legacy BIOSes seem to use that method. Stuffing a complete
> flashrom
>>>>> binary there would be overkill, though.
>>>>>
>>>> He was talking about turning flashrom into a library.  I guess you'd
>>>> have to ask him about the details though.
>>>>
>>> Well like I said earlier. Why not setup a small jffs2 filesystem in
> flash
>>> to host filo.conf?
>>
>> Code complexity and minimum size of jffs2 (5*eraseblocksize (64 kByte
>> minimum) according to some tests) are the big problems here. Even if the
>> code complexity was kept local, allocating 320 kByte of flash for
>> filo.conf would be a showstopper. You may be able to get size
>> requirements down with hacks and newer jffs2.
> 
> Well it looked to me when I last looked that 2 flash blocks that you
> alternated writing to for BIOS config uses would probably be a good
> idea.
> 
> In addition as I recall a lot of SST flash parts had 4K erase blocks.
> And some others had a few small erase blocks.  So you can dramatically
> get the erase size down.
> 
> The only downside is that you don't get as many erases as if you
> had done wear leveling across the entire device.  But for something
> you write infrequently it would not be a big deal.
> 
Thanks for the input Eric, this sounds promising :-)

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org