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mtd: nand: omap: Documentation: How to select correct ECC scheme for …
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…your device ?

- Adds DT binding property for BCH16 ECC scheme
 - Adds describes on factors which determine choice of ECC scheme for particular device

CC: devicetree@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Pekon Gupta <pekon@ti.com>
Signed-off-by: Brian Norris <computersforpeace@gmail.com>
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pekon gupta authored and Brian Norris committed May 21, 2014
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45 changes: 45 additions & 0 deletions Documentation/devicetree/bindings/mtd/gpmc-nand.txt
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Expand Up @@ -28,6 +28,8 @@ Optional properties:
"ham1" 1-bit Hamming ecc code
"bch4" 4-bit BCH ecc code
"bch8" 8-bit BCH ecc code
"bch16" 16-bit BCH ECC code
Refer below "How to select correct ECC scheme for your device ?"

- ti,nand-xfer-type: A string setting the data transfer type. One of:

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -90,3 +92,46 @@ Example for an AM33xx board:
};
};

How to select correct ECC scheme for your device ?
--------------------------------------------------
Higher ECC scheme usually means better protection against bit-flips and
increased system lifetime. However, selection of ECC scheme is dependent
on various other factors also like;

(1) support of built in hardware engines.
Some legacy OMAP SoC do not have ELM harware engine, so those SoC cannot
support ecc-schemes with hardware error-correction (BCHx_HW). However
such SoC can use ecc-schemes with software library for error-correction
(BCHx_HW_DETECTION_SW). The error correction capability with software
library remains equivalent to their hardware counter-part, but there is
slight CPU penalty when too many bit-flips are detected during reads.

(2) Device parameters like OOBSIZE.
Other factor which governs the selection of ecc-scheme is oob-size.
Higher ECC schemes require more OOB/Spare area to store ECC syndrome,
so the device should have enough free bytes available its OOB/Spare
area to accomodate ECC for entire page. In general following expression
helps in determining if given device can accomodate ECC syndrome:
"2 + (PAGESIZE / 512) * ECC_BYTES" >= OOBSIZE"
where
OOBSIZE number of bytes in OOB/spare area
PAGESIZE number of bytes in main-area of device page
ECC_BYTES number of ECC bytes generated to protect
512 bytes of data, which is:
'3' for HAM1_xx ecc schemes
'7' for BCH4_xx ecc schemes
'14' for BCH8_xx ecc schemes
'26' for BCH16_xx ecc schemes

Example(a): For a device with PAGESIZE = 2048 and OOBSIZE = 64 and
trying to use BCH16 (ECC_BYTES=26) ecc-scheme.
Number of ECC bytes per page = (2 + (2048 / 512) * 26) = 106 B
which is greater than capacity of NAND device (OOBSIZE=64)
Hence, BCH16 cannot be supported on given device. But it can
probably use lower ecc-schemes like BCH8.

Example(b): For a device with PAGESIZE = 2048 and OOBSIZE = 128 and
trying to use BCH16 (ECC_BYTES=26) ecc-scheme.
Number of ECC bytes per page = (2 + (2048 / 512) * 26) = 106 B
which can be accomodate in the OOB/Spare area of this device
(OOBSIZE=128). So this device can use BCH16 ecc-scheme.

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