I wanted try something other than JFFS2 as the rootfs and decided to go with UBIFS. Thanks to GIT’s brilliance I had no trouble pulling the UBIFS kernel patches from their tree to mine.
It seems that the UBIFS hasn’t had many NOR flash users before me and it needed some fixes. Artem Bityutskiy was extremely helpful in fixing the deficiencies and helping me out. After a few debug rounds I now have UBIFS root on my Gumstix.
I created the UBIFS image with the following commands:
sudo mkfs.ubifs --compr=zlib -r /tmp/rootfs -m 1 -e 130944 -c 120 -o ubifs.img
ubinize -o ubi.img -m 1 -p 128KiB -v ubinize.cfg
With this ubinize.cfg:
[ubifs]
mode=ubi
image=ubifs.img
vol_id=0
vol_size=13MiB
vol_type=dynamic
vol_name=rootfs
vol_alignment=1
vol_flags=autoresize
Note that I have reserved 2MiB for the kernel partition.
I had to add one extra parameter to the kernel args to specify what MTD partition I wanted to use:
console=ttyS0,115200n8 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs reboot=cold,hard ubi.mtd=1
Now my Gumstix boots with simplified kernel to busybox shell in roughly 4.2 seconds (counted from the bootm command in U-Boot).
