What about the flash patent?

Posted Mar 3, 2009 9:46 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: What about the flash patent? by njs
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

that isn't a problem directly for linux today because linux today doesn't have access to the raw eraseblocks, it's accessing the flash through a layer that hides this from the OS (at least on commodity hardware, there are probably some special cases where the raw flash is exposed, but not very many of them)

this isn't saying that it won't impact linux, but it will do so by making all the hardware that implements the translation layers more expensive, not by putting a price on the linux software.

it may have an impact for some future filesystems that are aiming at directly managing the flash (implementing wear leveling, etc), but I don't know of anything currently in the kernel that manipulates eraseblocks.

David Lang

What about the flash patent?

Posted Mar 3, 2009 11:39 UTC (Tue) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (1 responses)

Huh? Why wouldn't jffs(2) and ubifs count? Just about any embedded device talks directly to the flash chips, translation layers are only used for USB/SATA/IDE flash drives and memory cards. Or do you mean something else?

What about the flash patent?

Posted Mar 3, 2009 12:09 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I forgot about jffs, and I didn't think that ubifs was in the kernel yet.