xref: /openbmc/u-boot/doc/README.nand (revision c9aa831e)
1NAND FLASH commands and notes
2
3See NOTE below!!!
4
5# (C) Copyright 2003
6# Dave Ellis, SIXNET, dge@sixnetio.com
7#
8# See file CREDITS for list of people who contributed to this
9# project.
10#
11# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
12# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
13# published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
14# the License, or (at your option) any later version.
15#
16# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
17# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
18# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
19# GNU General Public License for more details.
20#
21# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
22# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
23# Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston,
24# MA 02111-1307 USA
25
26Commands:
27
28   nand bad
29      Print a list of all of the bad blocks in the current device.
30
31   nand device
32      Print information about the current NAND device.
33
34   nand device num
35      Make device `num' the current device and print information about it.
36
37   nand erase off|partition size
38   nand erase clean [off|partition size]
39      Erase `size' bytes starting at offset `off'. Alternatively partition
40      name can be specified, in this case size will be eventually limited
41      to not exceed partition size (this behaviour applies also to read
42      and write commands). Only complete erase blocks can be erased.
43
44      If `erase' is specified without an offset or size, the entire flash
45      is erased. If `erase' is specified with partition but without an
46      size, the entire partition is erased.
47
48      If `clean' is specified, a JFFS2-style clean marker is written to
49      each block after it is erased.
50
51      This command will not erase blocks that are marked bad. There is
52      a debug option in cmd_nand.c to allow bad blocks to be erased.
53      Please read the warning there before using it, as blocks marked
54      bad by the manufacturer must _NEVER_ be erased.
55
56   nand info
57      Print information about all of the NAND devices found.
58
59   nand read addr ofs|partition size
60      Read `size' bytes from `ofs' in NAND flash to `addr'.  Blocks that
61      are marked bad are skipped.  If a page cannot be read because an
62      uncorrectable data error is found, the command stops with an error.
63
64   nand read.oob addr ofs|partition size
65      Read `size' bytes from the out-of-band data area corresponding to
66      `ofs' in NAND flash to `addr'. This is limited to the 16 bytes of
67      data for one 512-byte page or 2 256-byte pages. There is no check
68      for bad blocks or ECC errors.
69
70   nand write addr ofs|partition size
71      Write `size' bytes from `addr' to `ofs' in NAND flash.  Blocks that
72      are marked bad are skipped.  If a page cannot be read because an
73      uncorrectable data error is found, the command stops with an error.
74
75      As JFFS2 skips blocks similarly, this allows writing a JFFS2 image,
76      as long as the image is short enough to fit even after skipping the
77      bad blocks.  Compact images, such as those produced by mkfs.jffs2
78      should work well, but loading an image copied from another flash is
79      going to be trouble if there are any bad blocks.
80
81   nand write.trimffs addr ofs|partition size
82      Enabled by the CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TRIMFFS macro. This command will write to
83      the NAND flash in a manner identical to the 'nand write' command
84      described above -- with the additional check that all pages at the end
85      of eraseblocks which contain only 0xff data will not be written to the
86      NAND flash. This behaviour is required when flashing UBI images
87      containing UBIFS volumes as per the UBI FAQ[1].
88
89      [1] http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html#L_flasher_algo
90
91   nand write.oob addr ofs|partition size
92      Write `size' bytes from `addr' to the out-of-band data area
93      corresponding to `ofs' in NAND flash. This is limited to the 16 bytes
94      of data for one 512-byte page or 2 256-byte pages. There is no check
95      for bad blocks.
96
97   nand read.raw addr ofs|partition [count]
98   nand write.raw addr ofs|partition [count]
99      Read or write one or more pages at "ofs" in NAND flash, from or to
100      "addr" in memory.  This is a raw access, so ECC is avoided and the
101      OOB area is transferred as well.  If count is absent, it is assumed
102      to be one page.  As with .yaffs2 accesses, the data is formatted as
103      a packed sequence of "data, oob, data, oob, ..." -- no alignment of
104      individual pages is maintained.
105
106Configuration Options:
107
108   CONFIG_CMD_NAND
109      Enables NAND support and commmands.
110
111   CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TORTURE
112      Enables the torture command (see description of this command below).
113
114   CONFIG_MTD_NAND_ECC_JFFS2
115      Define this if you want the Error Correction Code information in
116      the out-of-band data to be formatted to match the JFFS2 file system.
117      CONFIG_MTD_NAND_ECC_YAFFS would be another useful choice for
118      someone to implement.
119
120   CONFIG_SYS_MAX_NAND_DEVICE
121      The maximum number of NAND devices you want to support.
122
123   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_CHIPS
124      The maximum number of NAND chips per device to be supported.
125
126   CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT
127      Traditionally, glue code in drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c has driven
128      the initialization process -- it provides the mtd and nand
129      structs, calls a board init function for a specific device,
130      calls nand_scan(), and registers with mtd.
131
132      This arrangement does not provide drivers with the flexibility to
133      run code between nand_scan_ident() and nand_scan_tail(), or other
134      deviations from the "normal" flow.
135
136      If a board defines CONFIG_SYS_NAND_SELF_INIT, drivers/mtd/nand/nand.c
137      will make one call to board_nand_init(), with no arguments.  That
138      function is responsible for calling a driver init function for
139      each NAND device on the board, that performs all initialization
140      tasks except setting mtd->name, and registering with the rest of
141      U-Boot.  Those last tasks are accomplished by calling  nand_register()
142      on the new mtd device.
143
144      Example of new init to be added to the end of an existing driver
145      init:
146
147	/*
148	 * devnum is the device number to be used in nand commands
149	 * and in mtd->name.  Must be less than
150	 * CONFIG_SYS_NAND_MAX_DEVICE.
151	 */
152	mtd = &nand_info[devnum];
153
154	/* chip is struct nand_chip, and is now provided by the driver. */
155	mtd->priv = &chip;
156
157	/*
158	 * Fill in appropriate values if this driver uses these fields,
159	 * or uses the standard read_byte/write_buf/etc. functions from
160	 * nand_base.c that use these fields.
161	 */
162	chip.IO_ADDR_R = ...;
163	chip.IO_ADDR_W = ...;
164
165	if (nand_scan_ident(mtd, CONFIG_SYS_MAX_NAND_CHIPS, NULL))
166		error out
167
168	/*
169	 * Insert here any code you wish to run after the chip has been
170	 * identified, but before any other I/O is done.
171	 */
172
173	if (nand_scan_tail(mtd))
174		error out
175
176	if (nand_register(devnum))
177		error out
178
179      In addition to providing more flexibility to the driver, it reduces
180      the difference between a U-Boot driver and its Linux counterpart.
181      nand_init() is now reduced to calling board_nand_init() once, and
182      printing a size summary.  This should also make it easier to
183      transition to delayed NAND initialization.
184
185      Please convert your driver even if you don't need the extra
186      flexibility, so that one day we can eliminate the old mechanism.
187
188NOTE:
189=====
190
191The current NAND implementation is based on what is in recent
192Linux kernels.  The old legacy implementation has been removed.
193
194If you have board code which used CONFIG_NAND_LEGACY, you'll need
195to convert to the current NAND interface for it to continue to work.
196
197The Disk On Chip driver is currently broken and has been for some time.
198There is a driver in drivers/mtd/nand, taken from Linux, that works with
199the current NAND system but has not yet been adapted to the u-boot
200environment.
201
202Additional improvements to the NAND subsystem by Guido Classen, 10-10-2006
203
204JFFS2 related commands:
205
206  implement "nand erase clean" and old "nand erase"
207  using both the new code which is able to skip bad blocks
208  "nand erase clean" additionally writes JFFS2-cleanmarkers in the oob.
209
210Miscellaneous and testing commands:
211  "markbad [offset]"
212  create an artificial bad block (for testing bad block handling)
213
214  "scrub [offset length]"
215  like "erase" but don't skip bad block. Instead erase them.
216  DANGEROUS!!! Factory set bad blocks will be lost. Use only
217  to remove artificial bad blocks created with the "markbad" command.
218
219  "torture offset"
220  Torture block to determine if it is still reliable.
221  Enabled by the CONFIG_CMD_NAND_TORTURE configuration option.
222  This command returns 0 if the block is still reliable, else 1.
223  If the block is detected as unreliable, it is up to the user to decide to
224  mark this block as bad.
225  The analyzed block is put through 3 erase / write cycles (or less if the block
226  is detected as unreliable earlier).
227  This command can be used in scripts, e.g. together with the markbad command to
228  automate retries and handling of possibly newly detected bad blocks if the
229  nand write command fails.
230  It can also be used manually by users having seen some NAND errors in logs to
231  search the root cause of these errors.
232  The underlying nand_torture() function is also useful for code willing to
233  automate actions following a nand->write() error. This would e.g. be required
234  in order to program or update safely firmware to NAND, especially for the UBI
235  part of such firmware.
236
237
238NAND locking command (for chips with active LOCKPRE pin)
239
240  "nand lock"
241  set NAND chip to lock state (all pages locked)
242
243  "nand lock tight"
244  set NAND chip to lock tight state (software can't change locking anymore)
245
246  "nand lock status"
247  displays current locking status of all pages
248
249  "nand unlock [offset] [size]"
250  unlock consecutive area (can be called multiple times for different areas)
251
252  "nand unlock.allexcept [offset] [size]"
253  unlock all except specified consecutive area
254
255I have tested the code with board containing 128MiB NAND large page chips
256and 32MiB small page chips.
257