Replicant

h1. EMMCFirmwareBugs

{{toc}}

h2. Data corruption

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.

h3. Affected devices

h4. VTU00M

*Affected devices*: Some Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300)

*Vendor kernel patch*: "mmc: Soft-patch MoviNAND VTU00M (16GB) eMMC failure":https://git.replicant.us/replicant/kernel_samsung_smdk4412/commit/?id=da8461692362317a8ffce4d4646953985fcf4e1d

*Upstream status*: not upstream

*Replicant >=9 status*: not yet ported

h5. How to check

As this patch shows:

<pre>

+	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;

</pre>

* The name of the eMMC is VTU00M

* Only certain revisions are affected (revision 0xf1)

* The revision is probably in the prv field

With Replicant > 6 we can find the eMMC name like that:

<pre>

$ adb root

$ adb shell

i9300:/ # cat /sys/bus/mmc/devices/mmc2:0001/name

VTU00M

</pre>

Here this has been tested with a GT-I9300 with a work in progress Replicant 10 image that uses a kernel closely based on upstream Linux.

h5. Vendor kernel workaround analysis

The "mmc: Soft-patch MoviNAND VTU00M (16GB) eMMC failure":https://git.replicant.us/replicant/kernel_samsung_smdk4412/commit/?id=da8461692362317a8ffce4d4646953985fcf4e1d 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.