querying status ?

Hi,
Is there a way to query the status of MTD devices? We are using mtd
over a NOR flash device with jffs2 filesystem. At boot time, there are occasionally more than one processes accessing the filesystem and one of our utilities reads strange values (eg 0xff4fff4f) during bootup. It reads this value by dereferencing a pointer to a memory mapped address.. eg;

       U32 base = 0x7fc0000;
       memcpy(buff, (void *)base, sizeof(buff));

9 times out of 10, valid data is read using this method. But the other time it seems there's some operation keeping us from accessing flash... ideally, we'd like to be able to query (and maybe lock) flash during this read. Our first thought was to try to fopen /dev/mtdblockX for reading, but this does not work.

Thanks in advance,

Thank you,
Dennis McLeod
Software Engineer
BittWare, Inc
9 Hills Ave
Concord, NH 03301
[email protected]
603 226 0404 x514