Let's cut to the chase: does the SheevaPlug have bad flash memory?

[plugit]

Certainly seems that way, given that most people are complaining about bad blocks. Doesn't seem to be a reporting issue either, since what I'm witnessing appears to be degradation.

Maybe a more likely answer may be something bad in the kernel, corrupting the flash?

Either way, seems to be a problem.

[jlpoole]

Using Gentoo 2.6.30-rc1 I get:

NAND device: Manufacturer ID: 0xad, Chip ID: 0xdc (Hynix NAND 512MiB 3,3V 8-bit)
Scanning device for bad blocks
Bad eraseblock 785 at 0x000006220000
Bad eraseblock 949 at 0x0000076a0000
Bad eraseblock 1135 at 0x000008de0000
Bad eraseblock 1297 at 0x00000a220000
Bad eraseblock 1791 at 0x00000dfe0000
Bad eraseblock 1831 at 0x00000e4e0000
Bad eraseblock 1982 at 0x00000f7c0000
Creating 3 MTD partitions on "orion_nand":
0x000000000000-0x000000100000 : "u-boot"
0x000000100000-0x000000500000 : "uImage"
0x000000500000-0x000020000000 : "root"

Is this normal?  Should I continue to monitor it and save the results looking for changes?

[dattaway]

If you have bad blocks and have access to an oscilloscope, check to make sure the power supply has absolutely no noise on the output.  A bad power supply can really cause a lot of random problems and memory errors.

[solstice]

I get the same thing regarding the bad memory block. To tell  you the truth, I rather boot directly from harddisk anyways. In any case, I have not seem this affecting me much. I supposed they may have blocked out the bad memory block when writing to it.

[elBradford]

I haven't had any bad block errors. But I've started booting from SD and it is MUCH faster.

[solstice]

I haven't had any bad block errors. But I've started booting from SD and it is MUCH faster.

When you say you started to boot from SD, did you use the SDIO or use a USB -> SD converter? If using the SDIO, how did you get the uboot to recognize the location?

[elBradford]

When you say you started to boot from SD, did you use the SDIO or use a USB -> SD converter? If using the SDIO, how did you get the uboot to recognize the location?

I boot from an SD card in the IO slot. Instructions are here.

[dg]

That's not booting from SD --- that's using the SD card as a root filesystem. You're still booting the kernel from the NAND flash. What we really want is to be able to get u-boot to load the kernel from an SD card, which it currently doesn't support...

[tony.p.lee]

You probably know this already.

Make sure you don't use cp command in the Linux or uboot to update the kernel image and filesystem.

You need nandwrite which handle bad block.