mtd-utils in busybox

Ladislav Michl ladis at linux-mips.org
Fri Nov 28 18:44:31 UTC 2008


On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 05:58:59PM +0100, Schlaegl Manfred jun. wrote:
> Yes, I see. I already wrote an own implemtation of nandwrite, used in
> our auto-update-system.
> I know, it's very less effort to add the current existing mtd-utils to
> busybox.

Sure, copy&paste usually is effortless and useless. What does it bring
you except having mdt-utils functionality inside of busybox binary? Did
you also fixed nandwrite's bugs or just removed buggy functionality? In
former case I'm interested in patch. I do not want to annoy you, just
explain that it is not about merging random pieces of code, but also
maintaining them and making them maintainable. And fork does not make it
so. Parhaps you could show your implementation and we could work on
fixing nandwrite's bugs first. Can you (or anyone interested) explain
how do you use nandwrite, because currently it cannot be used when
'noecc' or 'oob' options are present nor when reading image from stdin.
Then I'll fix nandwrite in mtd-utils and you can copy code to busybox.
Arrgh. So what should be nandwrite bahaviour when 'noecc' and 'oob'
options are given?

> I understand that, but my thought was more a matter of distribution,
> than of code/size-advatages:
> 1. Busybox is used in many embedded devices with raw (nand-)flash chips,
> so mtd-utils would fit very well in the whole concept.

That argument could be easily extended to any utility anyone may ever
want to use on a random embedded device.

> 2. Easy configuration of busybox and therefore scalabilty. With
> Busybox-configuration we're able to scale for a system with direct
> nand-flash, so without ftl-, ubifs-tools, etc.

To be honest I do not understand above. It is pretty easy to provide
scalable system built even from "traditional" utilities. It will be just
bigger.
http://www.pengutronix.de/software/ptxdist/index_en.html
And because size matters in embedded, there is busybox and uClibc. But I
do not buy an argument that every single utility needs to be duplicated
in busybox.

Having two copies of the very similar code in two independent
repositories in a situation when even original repository it not well
maintained - people tend to complain about broken things, but noone is
sending patches - would certainly not improve situation.

Why do you think it is so much better having mtd-utils integrated?
If that's code size, you will hardly save more than few kilobytes. Easy
configuration and compilation? See link above.

Best regards,
	ladis



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