UBI: R/O block driver on top of UBI volumes

This commit introduces read-only block device emulation on top of UBI volumes.

Given UBI takes care of wear leveling and bad block management it's possible
to add a thin layer to enable block device access to UBI volumes.
This allows to use a block-oriented filesystem on a flash device.

The UBI block devices are meant to be used in conjunction with any
regular, block-oriented file system (e.g. ext4), although it's primarily
targeted at read-only file systems, such as squashfs.

Block devices are created upon user request through new ioctls:
UBI_IOCVOLATTBLK to attach and UBI_IOCVOLDETBLK to detach.
Also, a new UBI module parameter is added 'ubi.block'. This parameter is
needed in order to attach a block device on boot-up time, allowing to
mount the rootfs on a ubiblock device.
For instance, you could have these kernel parameters:

  ubi.mtd=5 ubi.block=0,0 root=/dev/ubiblock0_0

Or, if you compile ubi as a module:

  $ modprobe ubi mtd=/dev/mtd5 block=/dev/ubi0_0

Artem: amend commentaries and massage the patch a little bit.

Signed-off-by: Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel.garcia@free-electrons.com>
Signed-off-by: Artem Bityutskiy <artem.bityutskiy@linux.intel.com>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
index 57deae961429..6e30a3c280d0 100644
--- a/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
+++ b/drivers/mtd/ubi/build.c
@@ -1298,6 +1298,15 @@ static int __init ubi_init(void)
 		}
 	}
 
+	err = ubiblock_init();
+	if (err) {
+		ubi_err("block: cannot initialize, error %d", err);
+
+		/* See comment above re-ubi_is_module(). */
+		if (ubi_is_module())
+			goto out_detach;
+	}
+
 	return 0;
 
 out_detach:
@@ -1326,6 +1335,8 @@ static void __exit ubi_exit(void)
 {
 	int i;
 
+	ubiblock_exit();
+
 	for (i = 0; i < UBI_MAX_DEVICES; i++)
 		if (ubi_devices[i]) {
 			mutex_lock(&ubi_devices_mutex);