[syslinux] reliable use of storage devices with FTL (was: Re: [Sugar-devel] Unbootable machine)

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 12:44 +0200, Sascha Silbe wrote:
> So effectively you're saying USB sticks, SD cards and probably most
> SSDs can't be used reliably in normal operation (i.e. for writing)
> because they don't provide raw NAND access?

Yes.

There's no _fundamental_ reason for that to be the case -- it is
theoretically possible to write a firmware for one of these devices
which _doesn't_ lose data. It's just that I haven't seen it happen yet.
As I said, there are some devices out there which do seem promising, but
they're still new.

I don't claim that the file systems which work on raw flash are perfect
either -- but at least if something goes wrong there your data can
probably be salvaged; it's not just a black box. And we can _improve_
them. Isn't that why we prefer open source?

(We have open source code which implements FTLs too, and we can use
'normal' file systems on top of those. But mostly we don't, because it's
not a very sensible approach).

-- 
dwmw2