jffs2 freezing in gc for long time...

[David Jander]

Hi list,

I have the following situation:

CPU: MPC852T-100MHz
Flash: 32Mbyte mirror-bit, 15Mbyte jffs2 partition rw-mouted
Kernel: 2.4.25 (linuxppc_2_4_devel CVS from denx from a month ago or so, with 
custom patches not concerning MTD at all). For completeness, it contains the 
file fs/jffs2/gc.c version: gc.c,v 1.145 2005/02/09 09:09:01

Sometimes, I get this:
During boot, mounting is quick, but when starting syslogd, it freezes for some 
20 minutes, then syslogd returns an error (exit!=0) but the daemon keeps 
running in background, as well as the garbage collection thread from jffs2 
for some additional minutes. During that time, everything like "ls -l" on a 
certain directory of the flash partition freezes (status D is ps aux) until 
the GC thread has finished.

I can understand that GC has to occur at some time, but is it normal that it 
takes THAT long???

Is there a newer version of the MTD driver that does not present these 
symptoms?

If this is supposed to work like that, I would say jffs2 is pretty useless for 
any embedded system, so it is not supposed to be like that, right? RIGHT??

What am I doing wrong? Is the flash partition too big? Shouldn't I be using 
jffs2?

Any advice is appreciated...

Greetings,

-- 
David Jander