Memory Technology Device (MTD) Subsystem for Linux

Design aims

We're working on a generic Linux subsystem for memory devices, especially Flash devices.

The aim of the system is to make it simple to provide a driver for new hardware, by providing a generic interface between the hardware drivers and the upper layers of the system.

Hardware drivers need to know nothing about the storage formats used, such as FTL, FFS2, etc., but will only need to provide simple routines for read, write and erase. Presentation of the device's contents to the user in an appropriate form will be handled by the upper layers of the system.

Memory Technology Device

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Memory Technology Device (MTD) is a type of embedded flash memory that:

• consists of eraseblocks rather than clusters like in hard drives.
• eraseblocks are large (32KiB, 128KiB) compared to hard drive's sector size (512 to 1024 bytes).
• maintains three main operations - read from eraseblock, write to eraseblock, and erase eraseblock.
• bad eraseblocks are not hidden and should be dealt with in software.
• eraseblocks get worn-out (i.e., bad and unusable) after about 10⁴-10⁵ erase cycles.

MTD devices are somewhat more difficult to operate than hard drives due to their specific architecture.

[edit]External links

• http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org