Several devices have fixes or workarounds in vendor kernels for data corruptions in the eMMC. This can lead to non-working devices as it could potentially corrupt the bootloaders for instance.
The bug #2104 has more details for the Galaxy SIII.
Affected devices: Some Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300)
Vendor kernel patch: mmc: Soft-patch MoviNAND VTU00M (16GB) eMMC failure
Upstream status: not upstream
Replicant >=9 status: not yet ported
As this patch shows:
+ if (!strncmp(host->card->cid.prod_name, "VTU00M", 6) && + (host->card->cid.prod_rev == 0xf1) && + (mmc_start_movi_smart(host->card) == 0x2)) + host->card->movi_ops = 0x2;
The mmc: Soft-patch MoviNAND VTU00M (16GB) eMMC failure patch patches the eMMC firmware at runtime (it patches the firmware in RAM).
The eMMC firmware patch makes the eMMC hang when a corruption is about to happen.