JFFS2

[cleverca22]

has anybody tried using JFFS2 as the root filesystem on a pi?, i'm thinking of trying it out to see how well it works

[jimbox51]

JFFS and JFFS2 are meant to be used when you have direct access to the NAND flash chips.
The usual scenario for use is when a board has flash chips directly soldered and connected to the processor.

As the raspberrypi uses an SD card - the only access is via the sdcard interface to the embedded flash controller in the SD card itself. This controller does some of the things (wear levelling etc) that JFFS2 would need to do for the raw flash chips it controls.

See this article http://lwn.net/Articles/528617/

[cleverca22]

yeah, i was just wondering if it could be forced to work, even thru the 2nd layer of wear leveling on the sd controller

the issue i can see, is that when your card is 90% full, and 90% read-only (os files), any constant use in the remaining 10% can overwear those pages, while leaving the other 90% virtualy untouched

acording to wikipedia, JFFS2 will copy unmodified pages every now and then so those sectors also get worn evenly, rather then forcing the wear into a small section

[hojnikb]

just dont worry about wearing out the card..
if its not a garbage card, it will spread writes across the entire flash and move the static data aswell..
Either way, no need for jffs2, because its slow and not intended for block type devices.

If you're paranoid, just use sdcard as a place to store firmware and bios and use external drive for rootfs..

[cleverca22]

except i just killed the card i got from element14 by compiling mplayer a couple dozen times
its so bad that apt breaks too, the .postinst bash script turns into binary garbage and the fs gets corrupted within 30mins of booting, even if i had already ran fsck on the card

[hojnikb]

must be a bad card and not the problem with wear itself..

[cleverca22]

its the card that came from element14 with debian pre-installed
i would expect them to get decent cards