On Wednesday 12 November 2008 17:10:50 Andre Renaud wrote:
> Hello,
> We've got a product where we'd like to export some storage off via USB
> mass storage. However to do this under Linux it has to be a standard
> filesystem, since the host has to under stand it, ie: FAT. Unfortunately
> there doesn't seem to be a reliable way of running FAT on NAND under
> Linux (or any way, let along reliable).
>
> One suggestion has been to make a very large file on the YAFFS
> partition, which is internally fat formatted, mount it loopback on our
> device, and export it over USB when required.

That should work. Various people have loopmounted on yaffs for various 
reasons.

>
> Has anyone had any experience with this kind of setup? Are there any
> performance issues, or possibilities of corruption? The unit will
> probably lose power quite frequently, so we cannot be sure of a nice
> shutdown.

FAT is not very robust in itself. Running on top of YAFFS, or any other block 
driver, cannot fix that. Doing things like syncing will help.

-- Charles