About booting time of imx28 with UBIFS

[x10]

Hi, All

My design is imx28 + linux-2.6.35 + ubifs(nandflash K9F1G08). The boot time is about 30s which is too long for my application. As the UBIFS loading comsumes most of the time, is it possible to do something to reduce the boot time to a reseasonable level? It's apprecaited for any comment about the issue, thanks!

BR

Cheng Shi

[MarekVasut]

Try upstream U-Boot 2013.01, DMA and caches are well supported there and that reduces boot time dramatically.

[x10]

Hi, Marek, thanks for your reply. But in my case, most of time is comsumed by kernel installing RootFS and mounting \mnt\nandflash, both are UBIFS. Is it possible to reduce the time by using new version of u-boot? I got a bit confused.  Please give me more hits if convienent, thanks!

BR

Cheng Shi

[MarekVasut]

Ah, sorry. You're experiencing this on the kernel side. There is a new feature, called "UBIFS fastmap" in recent kernel (I think it's already in 3.7) which should lower the mount time, but that's only relevant for large NAND flashes. Also, the NAND flash driver is much better there. Give it a spin maybe?

[x10]

Thanks for quick response, :-). As I understanding, there are basically no way to reduce the mount time in current 2.6.35 framework, right? It's a big jump from 2.6 to 3.x, which means lots of work. Anyway I will think about it. thanks.

BR

Cheng Shi

[MarekVasut]

Ah good luck with that. You can try doing some really basic port and see if it solves your NAND issue. You can base that off of either MX28EVK or M28EVK, both are supported in upstream kernel.