Disk layout for XO-1.5

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 11:52 PM, Albert Cahalan<acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> BTW, note that the flash disk itself is not certain to be
>> fail-safe in the face of powerloss. Neither the firmware
> 
> Sure. In practice it seems to be extremely safe, as wedged NAND is one
> thing we haven't seen in the field (or on our dev machines). And jffs2
> is designed to survive unclean shutdowns.

The XO-1.5 will not be using raw NAND, nor will it be running jffs2.
There will be a microcontroller (running uneditable proprietary firmware)
emulating a block device.  Firmware of this type is sometimes done well,
and sometimes done poorly, as regards atomicity.

I would urge OLPC to search for a device whose controller firmware can be
modified, but I suspect OLPC has already written off that possibility.

--Ben

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