Getting Started Boot from ROM Flash Translation Layer (FTL)

We mentioned the FTL earlier. This has been largely superseded by JFFS2, mainly for technical reasons, but partly because of the increasing problem of software patents. However if you want to experiment with it, here are some brief instructions.

First initialise the FTL (note that no explicit erase is required, as ftl_format does this automatically):

ftl_format /dev/mtd2

We can now treat this as a normal block device. Currently the Flash is only scanned for new FTL partitions at boot time, so it will be necessary to reboot the target at this point (there is an ioctl to force a re-read, but I can't see anyway to invoke it!).

Now you have a couple of options. You can treat the FTL partition as one large block device, and as it is the first FTL device, it will be mapped to /dev/ftla. For example:

mkfs.minix /dev/ftla
mount /dev/ftla /mnt

Alternatively FTL supports partitioning, as with any normal block device. For example fdisk can be used on the the FTL device to create multiple soft partitions, which will be named /dev/ftla1, /dev/ftla2 and so on. For example:

fdisk /dev/ftla
mkfs.ext2 /dev/ftla1
mount /dev/ftla1 /mnt