On Wed, Dec 02, 1998 at 08:39:23PM -0600, Oliver Xymoron wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, Avery Pennarun wrote:
>
> > The problem with flash is that you can change ones to zeroes one bit at a
> > time, but changing them back is a big pain. Unless you use a custom
> > designed filesystem especially for flash use, you need to buffer entire
> > sectors of flash (64k each, and you usually need two) in memory. With 2MB
> > of ram, that gets kind of tight...
>
> Depends on the flash you use. AMD flash has small pages, Intel has huge
> ones. I know cuz I've made products with both. And any RW file system
> realistically usable on flash would have to tailored for flash, yes.
I was using AMD flash with 64k pages. I think there's a new type of flash
that has very small pages (around 512 bytes?) but I've been out of the loop
for a while now, so I'm not sure.
As for "realistically usable"... we were using FAT very effectively with two
1-sector buffers (128k total) on my last project. Of course, that was with
8 megs of RAM, not 2.
Have fun,
Avery
