NAND FTL
Posted by planetbeing on under iphe, realiti, comex, obama, oses, worst case, sdk, voodoo, kernel, presidency, sectors, samsung, linux, map | 
So the big news yesterday (other than Obama winning the presidency!) is that we have enough of a low-level NAND driver now that we're able to read from NAND! It was epic win. There turns out to be not as much hardware voodoo as, say, Merlot, so that's pretty good news. It seems to work (albeit slowly) and I even wrote the ECC routines today (and those seem to work as well).Unfortunately, in the course of this, we discovered several unfortunate things. First, I can't seem to find anything that might write to NAND. It's probably not much more complicated and probably reuses a lot of the stuff we've been doing, but it means that we might have to look in the kernel for that code, which sort of bites (a lot of the kernel is in C++ and not as friendly to reverse).
The second thing is the realization that all of Samsung's proprietary FTL code is in this thing. Without being able to understand it, we can't actually map sectors to data and we can't make sense of the NAND data or write new data to it in a useful way. Unfortunately, this code is liable to be ridiculously complex, since it's basically their SDK they ship to everyone. Without it, we can still proceed, but the iPhone can't read Linux's data and Linux can't read iPhone's data. In the worst case, we can't even have both OSes on the NAND at once.
Still, being able to dump NAND through USB is a substantial accomplishment, and we're well on our way.
Tagi: iphe, realiti, comex, obama, oses, worst case, sdk, voodoo, kernel, presidency, sectors, samsung, linux, map