UBI filesystem creation fails silently with 4k erase size

I have a NOR chip that reports a 4k erase size, so in my machine.conf I entered:

MKUBIFS_ARGS = "-m 1 -e 3968 -c 7040"
UBINIZE_ARGS = "-m 1 -p 4096"
UBI_VOLNAME = "qspi-rootfs"

When I create an image with "ubi" in the IMAGE_FSTYPES, the build runs and does not report any error, however it did NOT create the ubi filesystem image.

If I change the parameters for a 64k flash using:

MKUBIFS_ARGS = "-m 1 -e 65408 -c 440"

the ubi filesystem is created (both ubifs and ubi files).

Where can I find what went wrong? I'd expect big read error messages telling me that it failed to create an image for my device, but I cannot find such message anywhere.

So my questions are:

1) Why is there no error message when image creation fails?
2) Where is the log/output from the mkfs.ubi commands?
2) What could be wrong with my mkubifs parameters?

Quoted 21 lines · Mike Looijmans

I have a NOR chip that reports a 4k erase size, so in my machine.conf I entered:

MKUBIFS_ARGS = "-m 1 -e 3968 -c 7040"
UBINIZE_ARGS = "-m 1 -p 4096"
UBI_VOLNAME = "qspi-rootfs"

When I create an image with "ubi" in the IMAGE_FSTYPES, the build runs and does not report any error, however it did NOT create the ubi filesystem image.

If I change the parameters for a 64k flash using:

MKUBIFS_ARGS = "-m 1 -e 65408 -c 440"

the ubi filesystem is created (both ubifs and ubi files).

Where can I find what went wrong? I'd expect big read error messages telling me that it failed to create an image for my device, but I cannot find such message anywhere.

Quoted 6 lines

So my questions are:

1) Why is there no error message when image creation fails?
2) Where is the log/output from the mkfs.ubi commands?
2) What could be wrong with my mkubifs parameters?

The answer to that last question is that UBI itself refuses to work with a sector size below 15kB. Which results in UBI now failing to work on most NOR chips on the market because the kernel recently uses 4k erasing for all serial flash chips that support it.

So just the question remains why OE doesn't tell me about mkfs.ubifs failure?