xref: /openbmc/u-boot/doc/README.nand (revision 425faf74)
1NAND FLASH commands and notes
2
3See NOTE below!!!
4
5# (C) Copyright 2003
6# Dave Ellis, SIXNET, dge@sixnetio.com
7#
8# SPDX-License-Identifier:	GPL-2.0+
9
10Commands:
11
12   nand bad
13      Print a list of all of the bad blocks in the current device.
14
15   nand device
16      Print information about the current NAND device.
17
18   nand device num
19      Make device `num' the current device and print information about it.
20
21   nand erase off|partition size
22   nand erase clean [off|partition size]
23      Erase `size' bytes starting at offset `off'. Alternatively partition
24      name can be specified, in this case size will be eventually limited
25      to not exceed partition size (this behaviour applies also to read
26      and write commands). Only complete erase blocks can be erased.
27
28      If `erase' is specified without an offset or size, the entire flash
29      is erased. If `erase' is specified with partition but without an
30      size, the entire partition is erased.
31
32      If `clean' is specified, a JFFS2-style clean marker is written to
33      each block after it is erased.
34
35      This command will not erase blocks that are marked bad. There is
36      a debug option in cmd_nand.c to allow bad blocks to be erased.
37      Please read the warning there before using it, as blocks marked
38      bad by the manufacturer must _NEVER_ be erased.
39
40   nand info
41      Print information about all of the NAND devices found.
42
43   nand read addr ofs|partition size
44      Read `size' bytes from `ofs' in NAND flash to `addr'.  Blocks that
45      are marked bad are skipped.  If a page cannot be read because an
46      uncorrectable data error is found, the command stops with an error.
47
48   nand read.oob addr ofs|partition size
49      Read `size' bytes from the out-of-band data area corresponding to
50      `ofs' in NAND flash to `addr'. This is limited to the 16 bytes of
51      data for one 512-byte page or 2 256-byte pages. There is no check
52      for bad blocks or ECC errors.
53
54   nand write addr ofs|partition size
55      Write `size' bytes from `addr' to `ofs' in NAND flash.  Blocks that
56      are marked bad are skipped.  If a page cannot be read because an
57      uncorrectable data error is found, the command stops with an error.
58
59      As JFFS2 skips blocks similarly, this allows writing a JFFS2 image,
60      as long as the image is short enough to fit even after skipping the
61      bad blocks.  Compact images, such as those produced by mkfs.jffs2
62      should work well, but loading an image copied from another flash is
63      going to be trouble if there are any bad blocks.
64
65   nand write.trimffs addr ofs|partition size
66      Enabled by the CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TRIMFFS macro. This command will write to
67      the NAND flash in a manner identical to the 'nand write' command
68      described above -- with the additional check that all pages at the end
69      of eraseblocks which contain only 0xff data will not be written to the
70      NAND flash. This behaviour is required when flashing UBI images
71      containing UBIFS volumes as per the UBI FAQ[1].
72
73      [1] http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html#L_flasher_algo
74
75   nand write.oob addr ofs|partition size
76      Write `size' bytes from `addr' to the out-of-band data area
77      corresponding to `ofs' in NAND flash. This is limited to the 16 bytes
78      of data for one 512-byte page or 2 256-byte pages. There is no check
79      for bad blocks.
80
81   nand read.raw addr ofs|partition [count]
82   nand write.raw addr ofs|partition [count]
83      Read or write one or more pages at "ofs" in NAND flash, from or to
84      "addr" in memory.  This is a raw access, so ECC is avoided and the
85      OOB area is transferred as well.  If count is absent, it is assumed
86      to be one page.  As with .yaffs2 accesses, the data is formatted as
87      a packed sequence of "data, oob, data, oob, ..." -- no alignment of
88      individual pages is maintained.
89
90Configuration Options:
91
92   CONFIG_CMD_NAND
93      Enables NAND support and commmands.
94
95   CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TORTURE
96      Enables the torture command (see description of this command below).
97
98   CONFIG_MTD_NAND_ECC_JFFS2
99      Define this if you want the Error Correction Code information in
100      the out-of-band data to be formatted to match the JFFS2 file system.
101      CONFIG_MTD_NAND_ECC_YAFFS would be another useful choice for
102      someone to implement.
103
104   CONFIG_SYS_MAX_NAND_DEVICE
105      The maximum number of NAND devices you want to support.
106
107   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_CHIPS
108      The maximum number of NAND chips per device to be supported.
109
110   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT
111      Traditionally, glue code in drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c has driven
112      the initialization process -- it provides the mtd and nand
113      structs, calls a board init function for a specific device,
114      calls nand_scan(), and registers with mtd.
115
116      This arrangement does not provide drivers with the flexibility to
117      run code between nand_scan_ident() and nand_scan_tail(), or other
118      deviations from the "normal" flow.
119
120      If a board defines CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT, drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c
121      will make one call to board_nand_init(), with no arguments.  That
122      function is responsible for calling a driver init function for
123      each NAND device on the board, that performs all initialization
124      tasks except setting mtd->name, and registering with the rest of
125      U-Boot.  Those last tasks are accomplished by calling  nand_register()
126      on the new mtd device.
127
128      Example of new init to be added to the end of an existing driver
129      init:
130
131	/*
132	 * devnum is the device number to be used in nand commands
133	 * and in mtd->name.  Must be less than
134	 * CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_DEVICE.
135	 */
136	mtd = &nand_info[devnum];
137
138	/* chip is struct nand_chip, and is now provided by the driver. */
139	mtd->priv = &chip;
140
141	/*
142	 * Fill in appropriate values if this driver uses these fields,
143	 * or uses the standard read_byte/write_buf/etc. functions from
144	 * nand_base.c that use these fields.
145	 */
146	chip.IO_ADDR_R = ...;
147	chip.IO_ADDR_W = ...;
148
149	if (nand_scan_ident(mtd, CONFIG_SYS_MAX_NAND_CHIPS, NULL))
150		error out
151
152	/*
153	 * Insert here any code you wish to run after the chip has been
154	 * identified, but before any other I/O is done.
155	 */
156
157	if (nand_scan_tail(mtd))
158		error out
159
160	if (nand_register(devnum))
161		error out
162
163      In addition to providing more flexibility to the driver, it reduces
164      the difference between a U-Boot driver and its Linux counterpart.
165      nand_init() is now reduced to calling board_nand_init() once, and
166      printing a size summary.  This should also make it easier to
167      transition to delayed NAND initialization.
168
169      Please convert your driver even if you don't need the extra
170      flexibility, so that one day we can eliminate the old mechanism.
171
172NOTE:
173=====
174
175The current NAND implementation is based on what is in recent
176Linux kernels.  The old legacy implementation has been removed.
177
178If you have board code which used CONFIG_NAND_LEGACY, you'll need
179to convert to the current NAND interface for it to continue to work.
180
181The Disk On Chip driver is currently broken and has been for some time.
182There is a driver in drivers/mtd/nand, taken from Linux, that works with
183the current NAND system but has not yet been adapted to the u-boot
184environment.
185
186Additional improvements to the NAND subsystem by Guido Classen, 10-10-2006
187
188JFFS2 related commands:
189
190  implement "nand erase clean" and old "nand erase"
191  using both the new code which is able to skip bad blocks
192  "nand erase clean" additionally writes JFFS2-cleanmarkers in the oob.
193
194Miscellaneous and testing commands:
195  "markbad [offset]"
196  create an artificial bad block (for testing bad block handling)
197
198  "scrub [offset length]"
199  like "erase" but don't skip bad block. Instead erase them.
200  DANGEROUS!!! Factory set bad blocks will be lost. Use only
201  to remove artificial bad blocks created with the "markbad" command.
202
203  "torture offset"
204  Torture block to determine if it is still reliable.
205  Enabled by the CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TORTURE configuration option.
206  This command returns 0 if the block is still reliable, else 1.
207  If the block is detected as unreliable, it is up to the user to decide to
208  mark this block as bad.
209  The analyzed block is put through 3 erase / write cycles (or less if the block
210  is detected as unreliable earlier).
211  This command can be used in scripts, e.g. together with the markbad command to
212  automate retries and handling of possibly newly detected bad blocks if the
213  nand write command fails.
214  It can also be used manually by users having seen some NAND errors in logs to
215  search the root cause of these errors.
216  The underlying nand_torture() function is also useful for code willing to
217  automate actions following a nand->write() error. This would e.g. be required
218  in order to program or update safely firmware to NAND, especially for the UBI
219  part of such firmware.
220
221
222NAND locking command (for chips with active LOCKPRE pin)
223
224  "nand lock"
225  set NAND chip to lock state (all pages locked)
226
227  "nand lock tight"
228  set NAND chip to lock tight state (software can't change locking anymore)
229
230  "nand lock status"
231  displays current locking status of all pages
232
233  "nand unlock [offset] [size]"
234  unlock consecutive area (can be called multiple times for different areas)
235
236  "nand unlock.allexcept [offset] [size]"
237  unlock all except specified consecutive area
238
239I have tested the code with board containing 128MiB NAND large page chips
240and 32MiB small page chips.
241