On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 02:09:48PM -0800, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> This can have bad effects, e.g. for some flash systems which need to
> store data like bootloaders at a specific offset in flash.

BTW, since you haven't dealt with NAND flash, I'll point out that this
is actually pretty common, and is the reason that NAND flash parts are
typically speced to guarantee that physical block 0 is always free of
defects out of the factory.  I've worked with a couple of CPUs that have
internal bootstraps that only know how to read the first physical block
of an attached NAND flash.