AM35x WinEC 7 NAND Flash driver Bad Block Table

Hi Andreas,

Every time the board is booted the NAND flash tells the board where it's bad blocks are.  The board stores these information into RAM. In WINC there are two drivers that handle flash. The FMD driver handles the specific NAND  which in turn talks to the FAL driver  which handles the bad and reserved blocks for you.  FAL is a driver that is handled by Microsoft.  In WINCE7 I found the location for the FAL driver here: WINCE700\private\winceos\DRIVERS\FAL

 The closest thing to a block table can be found in falmain.cpp, in the DSK_Init function. A quick search did not yield where the FAL keeps track of new bad blocks after booting the board.

 FMD and FAL drivers have been upgraded for WINC 6.0 R2 and later to PDD (FMD equivalent) and MDD (FAL equivalent) drivers. There is also a rapper class that allows FMD drivers to talk to MDD drivers.  Despite this upgrade, it looked like the BSP for AM35X WINC7 I have is still sourcing in FAL and FMD drivers.

 There is a msdn site on flash drivers that gives a general description of how they are used: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee483398(v=winembedded.60).aspx

Regards

Thanks for your answer.

You wrote, that the driver reads the bad block info on every startup an stores it to RAM. Where do I find this in the source code of the driver?

I read, that FAL handles the wear leveling in WinCE. Does FAL also include a write and erase counter to count the write and erase actions for every block? Wear leveling means for me, that the write and erase actions are equally divide to all the blocks of the flash for increasing the lifetime. If FAL uses an write and erase counter, where is this counter stored? Do you know something about that?

Thanks and best regards,

Andreas

Hi Andreas,

Have you had a chance to read through the FAL driver and find where it initializes, reads, and writes yet?