[LinuxBIOS] [PATCH] v3: add a check for a termination member

Stefan Reinauer stepan at coresystems.de
Thu Jan 10 14:47:45 CET 2008


* ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> [080107 17:40]:
> I still find the explicit termination marker very interesting, esp.
> since it is flash rewrite friendly.

With a 100k average possible erase cycles per flash block, I never
managed to exceed the life time for a flash chip, before they would die
physically (ie. bend pins etc)

The one reason why we don't want to erase the flash is because we don't
want to have to rewrite the bootblock, risking to render the system
unusable without special equipment.

But to achieve safety here we don't even need to touch the "previous"
element if we want to add a new element to the lar. Because the previous
would point to the "empty" file or marker, and that's exactly the
position where a new file would be put.

> Pointers, let's not do them, instead, if we want such a thing, let's
> do indices. If we start doing pointers, LAR is no longer
> location-independent.

Obviously we would not add the base address of the lar in memory when
having a linked list but only keep the offset from the start of the lar.
It's still a linked list.



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