Hi,

When I go into U-boot and execute the mtdparts command on the board I am working on, I got the following partition information:

MaximASP (EEKv3.4.x)> mtdparts
device nand0 <maximasp_nand.0>, # parts = 9
#: name size offset mask_flags
0: u-boot 0x00200000 0x00000000 1
1: env0 0x00080000 0x00200000 1
2: env1 0x00080000 0x00280000 1
3: kernel0 0x00400000 0x00300000 0
4: kernel1 0x00400000 0x00700000 0
5: kernel2 0x00500000 0x00b00000 0
6: root0 0x06400000 0x01000000 0
7: root1 0x06400000 0x07400000 0
8: other 0x12800000 0x0d800000 0


My question is, how were those partition created in the first place? And how do i manipulate them (resize, add/remove a partition. ext.)

Thanks,
Dave Xu

The NAND flash partitions can be created in the board file. For eg arch/arm/mach-omap2/board-omap3beagle.c for beagleboard in the kernel source code. Sometimes, a small code can be executed just after basic initial boot to set up the partitions. Fortunately, you can define your own partitions without having to modify the kernel sources.
As an example, for omap2, you can try this on bootloader shell;
mtdparts=omap2-nand.0:128k(X-Loader)ro,256k(U-Boot)ro,128k(Environment),4m(Kernel)ro,32m(RootFS)ro,-(Data).
Here nand.o is nand driver file.

The above command may vary slightly depending on the target device you are working on. These sizes must be multiple of erase blocks which can be found on /sys/class/mtd/mtdx/erasesize.
You can create a flash file system like jffs2, ubifs etc depending on your requirement and each of the file system has its own commands to read info, erase, write.
Following link provides more insight into this discussion.
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/faq/general.html