xref: /openbmc/u-boot/doc/README.nand (revision c346e466)
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_ECCPOS
108      If specified, overrides the maximum number of ECC bytes
109      supported.  Useful for reducing image size, especially with SPL.
110      This must be at least 48 if nand_base.c is used.
111
112   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_OOBFREE
113      If specified, overrides the maximum number of free OOB regions
114      supported.  Useful for reducing image size, especially with SPL.
115      This must be at least 2 if nand_base.c is used.
116
117   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_CHIPS
118      The maximum number of NAND chips per device to be supported.
119
120   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT
121      Traditionally, glue code in drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c has driven
122      the initialization process -- it provides the mtd and nand
123      structs, calls a board init function for a specific device,
124      calls nand_scan(), and registers with mtd.
125
126      This arrangement does not provide drivers with the flexibility to
127      run code between nand_scan_ident() and nand_scan_tail(), or other
128      deviations from the "normal" flow.
129
130      If a board defines CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT, drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c
131      will make one call to board_nand_init(), with no arguments.  That
132      function is responsible for calling a driver init function for
133      each NAND device on the board, that performs all initialization
134      tasks except setting mtd->name, and registering with the rest of
135      U-Boot.  Those last tasks are accomplished by calling  nand_register()
136      on the new mtd device.
137
138      Example of new init to be added to the end of an existing driver
139      init:
140
141	/*
142	 * devnum is the device number to be used in nand commands
143	 * and in mtd->name.  Must be less than
144	 * CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_DEVICE.
145	 */
146	mtd = &nand_info[devnum];
147
148	/* chip is struct nand_chip, and is now provided by the driver. */
149	mtd->priv = &chip;
150
151	/*
152	 * Fill in appropriate values if this driver uses these fields,
153	 * or uses the standard read_byte/write_buf/etc. functions from
154	 * nand_base.c that use these fields.
155	 */
156	chip.IO_ADDR_R = ...;
157	chip.IO_ADDR_W = ...;
158
159	if (nand_scan_ident(mtd, CONFIG_SYS_MAX_NAND_CHIPS, NULL))
160		error out
161
162	/*
163	 * Insert here any code you wish to run after the chip has been
164	 * identified, but before any other I/O is done.
165	 */
166
167	if (nand_scan_tail(mtd))
168		error out
169
170	if (nand_register(devnum))
171		error out
172
173      In addition to providing more flexibility to the driver, it reduces
174      the difference between a U-Boot driver and its Linux counterpart.
175      nand_init() is now reduced to calling board_nand_init() once, and
176      printing a size summary.  This should also make it easier to
177      transition to delayed NAND initialization.
178
179      Please convert your driver even if you don't need the extra
180      flexibility, so that one day we can eliminate the old mechanism.
181
182
183   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_ONFI_DETECTION
184	Enables detection of ONFI compliant devices during probe.
185	And fetching device parameters flashed on device, by parsing
186	ONFI parameter page.
187
188   CONFIG_BCH
189	Enables software based BCH ECC algorithm present in lib/bch.c
190	This is used by SoC platforms which do not have built-in ELM
191	hardware engine required for BCH ECC correction.
192
193   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_BUSWIDTH_16BIT
194	Indicates that NAND device has 16-bit wide data-bus. In absence of this
195	config, bus-width of NAND device is assumed to be either 8-bit and later
196	determined by reading ONFI params.
197	Above config is useful when NAND device's bus-width information cannot
198	be determined from on-chip ONFI params, like in following scenarios:
199	- SPL boot does not support reading of ONFI parameters. This is done to
200	  keep SPL code foot-print small.
201	- In current U-Boot flow using nand_init(), driver initialization
202	  happens in board_nand_init() which is called before any device probe
203	  (nand_scan_ident + nand_scan_tail), thus device's ONFI parameters are
204	  not available while configuring controller. So a static CONFIG_NAND_xx
205	  is needed to know the device's bus-width in advance.
206	Some drivers using above config are:
207	drivers/mtd/nand/mxc_nand.c
208	drivers/mtd/nand/ndfc.c
209	drivers/mtd/nand/omap_gpmc.c
210
211
212Platform specific options
213=========================
214   CONFIG_NAND_OMAP_GPMC
215	Enables omap_gpmc.c driver for OMAPx and AMxxxx platforms.
216	GPMC controller is used for parallel NAND flash devices, and can
217	do ECC calculation (not ECC error detection) for HAM1, BCH4, BCH8
218	and BCH16 ECC algorithms.
219
220   CONFIG_NAND_OMAP_ELM
221	Enables omap_elm.c driver for OMAPx and AMxxxx platforms.
222	ELM controller is used for ECC error detection (not ECC calculation)
223	of BCH4, BCH8 and BCH16 ECC algorithms.
224	Some legacy platforms like OMAP3xx do not have in-built ELM h/w engine,
225	thus such SoC platforms need to depend on software library for ECC error
226	detection. However ECC calculation on such plaforms would still be
227	done by GPMC controller.
228
229   CONFIG_NAND_OMAP_ECCSCHEME
230	On OMAP platforms, this CONFIG specifies NAND ECC scheme.
231	It can take following values:
232	OMAP_ECC_HAM1_CODE_SW
233		1-bit Hamming code using software lib.
234		(for legacy devices only)
235	OMAP_ECC_HAM1_CODE_HW
236		1-bit Hamming code using GPMC hardware.
237		(for legacy devices only)
238	OMAP_ECC_BCH4_CODE_HW_DETECTION_SW
239		4-bit BCH code (unsupported)
240	OMAP_ECC_BCH4_CODE_HW
241		4-bit BCH code (unsupported)
242	OMAP_ECC_BCH8_CODE_HW_DETECTION_SW
243		8-bit BCH code with
244		- ecc calculation using GPMC hardware engine,
245		- error detection using software library.
246		- requires CONFIG_BCH to enable software BCH library
247		(For legacy device which do not have ELM h/w engine)
248	OMAP_ECC_BCH8_CODE_HW
249		8-bit BCH code with
250		- ecc calculation using GPMC hardware engine,
251		- error detection using ELM hardware engine.
252	OMAP_ECC_BCH16_CODE_HW
253		16-bit BCH code with
254		- ecc calculation using GPMC hardware engine,
255		- error detection using ELM hardware engine.
256
257	How to select ECC scheme on OMAP and AMxx platforms ?
258	-----------------------------------------------------
259	Though higher ECC schemes have more capability to detect and correct
260	bit-flips, but still selection of ECC scheme is dependent on following
261	- hardware engines present in SoC.
262		Some legacy OMAP SoC do not have ELM h/w engine thus such
263		SoC cannot support BCHx_HW ECC schemes.
264	- size of OOB/Spare region
265		With higher ECC schemes, more OOB/Spare area is required to
266		store ECC. So choice of ECC scheme is limited by NAND oobsize.
267
268	In general following expression can help:
269		NAND_OOBSIZE >= 2 + (NAND_PAGESIZE / 512) * ECC_BYTES
270	where
271		NAND_OOBSIZE	= number of bytes available in
272				OOB/spare area per NAND page.
273		NAND_PAGESIZE	= bytes in main-area of NAND page.
274		ECC_BYTES	= number of ECC bytes generated to
275				protect 512 bytes of data, which is:
276				3 for HAM1_xx ecc schemes
277				7 for BCH4_xx ecc schemes
278				14 for BCH8_xx ecc schemes
279				26 for BCH16_xx ecc schemes
280
281		example to check for BCH16 on 2K page NAND
282		NAND_PAGESIZE = 2048
283		NAND_OOBSIZE = 64
284		2 + (2048 / 512) * 26 = 106 > NAND_OOBSIZE
285		Thus BCH16 cannot be supported on 2K page NAND.
286
287		However, for 4K pagesize NAND
288		NAND_PAGESIZE = 4096
289		NAND_OOBSIZE = 64
290		ECC_BYTES = 26
291		2 + (4096 / 512) * 26 = 210 < NAND_OOBSIZE
292		Thus BCH16 can be supported on 4K page NAND.
293
294
295NOTE:
296=====
297
298The current NAND implementation is based on what is in recent
299Linux kernels.  The old legacy implementation has been removed.
300
301If you have board code which used CONFIG_NAND_LEGACY, you'll need
302to convert to the current NAND interface for it to continue to work.
303
304The Disk On Chip driver is currently broken and has been for some time.
305There is a driver in drivers/mtd/nand, taken from Linux, that works with
306the current NAND system but has not yet been adapted to the u-boot
307environment.
308
309Additional improvements to the NAND subsystem by Guido Classen, 10-10-2006
310
311JFFS2 related commands:
312
313  implement "nand erase clean" and old "nand erase"
314  using both the new code which is able to skip bad blocks
315  "nand erase clean" additionally writes JFFS2-cleanmarkers in the oob.
316
317Miscellaneous and testing commands:
318  "markbad [offset]"
319  create an artificial bad block (for testing bad block handling)
320
321  "scrub [offset length]"
322  like "erase" but don't skip bad block. Instead erase them.
323  DANGEROUS!!! Factory set bad blocks will be lost. Use only
324  to remove artificial bad blocks created with the "markbad" command.
325
326  "torture offset"
327  Torture block to determine if it is still reliable.
328  Enabled by the CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TORTURE configuration option.
329  This command returns 0 if the block is still reliable, else 1.
330  If the block is detected as unreliable, it is up to the user to decide to
331  mark this block as bad.
332  The analyzed block is put through 3 erase / write cycles (or less if the block
333  is detected as unreliable earlier).
334  This command can be used in scripts, e.g. together with the markbad command to
335  automate retries and handling of possibly newly detected bad blocks if the
336  nand write command fails.
337  It can also be used manually by users having seen some NAND errors in logs to
338  search the root cause of these errors.
339  The underlying nand_torture() function is also useful for code willing to
340  automate actions following a nand->write() error. This would e.g. be required
341  in order to program or update safely firmware to NAND, especially for the UBI
342  part of such firmware.
343
344
345NAND locking command (for chips with active LOCKPRE pin)
346
347  "nand lock"
348  set NAND chip to lock state (all pages locked)
349
350  "nand lock tight"
351  set NAND chip to lock tight state (software can't change locking anymore)
352
353  "nand lock status"
354  displays current locking status of all pages
355
356  "nand unlock [offset] [size]"
357  unlock consecutive area (can be called multiple times for different areas)
358
359  "nand unlock.allexcept [offset] [size]"
360  unlock all except specified consecutive area
361
362I have tested the code with board containing 128MiB NAND large page chips
363and 32MiB small page chips.
364