SnapGear announced that it has developed the first open source support for the M-Systems “Millennium Plus” DiskOnChip flash memory devices and INFTL (Inverse NAND Flash Translation Layer) flash management technology. The new Linux MTD (Memory Technology Device) subsystem driver support allows using M-Systems' latest flash storage… devices, which range from 8MB to 1GB in capacity, like standard hard disks in Linux. Previous to this, there was no open source support for the DiskOnChip/INFTL combination, SnapGear said.

According to SnapGear, the porting effort was complex and required current MTD tools to be modified and extended in order to be able to format and manage the INFTL algorithms and DiskOnChip Millennium Plus hardware. Addionally, a new tool was created for programming IPL (Initial Program Loader) code into the DiskOnChip, allowing the flash devices to serve as both a flash drive during system operation and a boot ROM replacement — “something that was impossible with raw NAND flash,” SnapGear said.

SnapGear said the new MTD drivers will be released as open source, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

 
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