Re: nandwrite vs. flashcp when writing image to mtd device

[David Oberhollenzer <david.oberhollenzer@sigma-star.at>]

Hi,

flashcp is a rather crude program and hasn't seen any improvements in way over a decade.
All it does is round the size of your input file up to the reported block size, erases
that range and then writes the input file.

It directly opens the device file, works on the raw fd and does 2 ioctls to retrieve
the erase size and erase that range.

The size of 6815744 happens to be the reported block size of 262144 * 26. Erasing multiple
blocks in one go is supported by the erase ioctl, it is also what libmtd does internally.

However, flashcp is completely oblivious of bad blocks, OOB size and other fun stuff.

nandwrite is somewhat more sophisticated. It is aware of all of the above and has a lot of
extra command line options for fine grained control over those things. It also uses libmtd
to access the flash which in turn is aware of a lot of newer ioctls and provides a number
of fallback code paths.

So yes, I would recommend using nandwrite for writing images to nand flashes.

Regards,

David

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