The Linux kernel developers, in their mysterious and infinite wisdom, decided that between version 2.6.17 and 2.6.19 they would change the naming scheme for accessing Flash chips.  I am sure the change is documented in a footnote somewhere, but it is not terribly obvious.  It is obvious that things that formerly worked are now broken, though.  It took me 2 to 3 hours of debugging to track down the fact that:

physmap_flash

…should now be called:

physmap-flash

Once a kernel parameter was changed slightly, everything magically started working again.  Why the change?  Who knows!?  Would you have noticed the difference if you were not looking for it?  I didn’t see it for a very long time, personally.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.