jffs2: Empty flash at 0x04a6aafc ends at 0x04a6b000

Description

You may see this, or similar messages when booting Linux or mounting file systems from NAND flash, using the generated jffs2 image from Yocto project directly.

The messages are printed in hundred of times, and sometimes can cause the serial console to hang.

Resolution

To workaround to this issue follow the steps below:

1. Go to the file system directory in the Yocto, e.g. poky-socfpga/build/tmp/work/socfpga_cyclone5-poky-linux-gnueabi/altera-gsrd-image-1.0-r0

2. Use this command to manually generate the proper type of jffs2 file according the NAND device you are selecting:

sudo mkfs.jffs2 --eraseblock=0x20000 --pagesize=0x800 --pad=0x8000000 -l -n -r ./rootfs/ -o altera-gsrd-image_0.jffs2

Please note:

1. The parameters of erase block size and page size must be read the NAND device\'s datasheet, and the correct values used in the arguments of the mkfs.jffs2 command.

2. The device tree setting must be checked to know the partition size assigned to file system. In this example, the root file system take place 128 MByte in partition 1 of NAND. So it need to pad output to 128M bytes with 0xFF.