From: "Jason R Thorpe" <thorpej@zembu.com>:
>
[chop]
>
> There are other things to consider in a flash file system other than the
> limited number of write cycles (and there are pretty obvious techniques
> for dealing with that anyway).  The most important one, esp. for embedded
> systems, is something called "run-in-place".  Consider the case of a
> memory-mapped flash... copying a read-only VTEXT page from the flash to
> a RAM page seems pretty wasteful if you can simply map the flash page
> directly, eh?

Depending on the access speed of the flash. :-)
One of the MPC850 based routers does something like this, but it will use
RAM
if it available and fallback (e.g. free RAM pages) to flash pages if it is
needed. (at least as it was explained to me)

-Andrew