Hi all,
I think I may have discovered a rather nasty bug in the chumby classic bootloader.

Recently I bricked my device (while hacking on a new kernel - my fault). I've now recovered it but I believe this problem could occur even with stock chumby firmware.

Basically the bootloader scans all the flash OOB data and creates an offset table to account for bad blocks. However this process does not take into account the partitionning scheme. In my case three new "bad" blocks appeared in the mtd1 partition (although this was due to a software bug the same could have occured due to normal wear). Note that mtd1 is the JFFS2 data partition, neither of the kernel image partitions (mtd2, mtd4) were affected.

BUT due to these extra 3 bad blocks the bootloader added 3 blocks of offset to the kernel flash address when copying the kernel from flash to RAM resulting in a failed boot (with both kernels)

Cheers,

Martin