[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] cp320703:
I feel I should start by saying I’m new to XDA and I know posts that don’t advance the discussion are discouraged, however I’ve just spend 4 hours carefully reading 50+ pages of posts (http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1504808&page=41 and this thread) and while the technical aspects are way above my skill level I feel like I’m understanding, at least in a basic way, what’s happening here and was hoping someone could confirm that my understanding is correct… I have not bricked myself thanks to carefully reading instructions before flashing and I would like to keep it that way, hence the time spent reading brick threads. To the point… so there was a bug that would randomly write 32kb of zeros’ over the inode’s or block bitmap’s of the /data partition of the emmc on our phones when flashing ICS from cwm touch, the bug is related to the kernel, possibly the way in which it handles the wipe in cwm, and kernels prior to FE07 are capable of producing this error, or at least that’s what you are currently attempting to verify. Sammy committed code to fix the bug but it’s a bit of a kludge and does not actually solve the problem at the controller level but simply blocks it from occurring, hence its need to run at every boot/wake etc….

If the recently committed code indeed does address the issues that’s causing /data to bork, kernels with the bug fix will be considered safe to flash from and we won’t have to odin back to FD26/EL29 stock with recovery to flash between different ICS versions? Additionally this would be much easier to address if there was 1. source for kernels’ and 2. publicly available drivers for the eemc controller were available. This leads to a question… sfhub, did you receive an answer or develop a theory to explain what you were referencing in this post?

“This is the part I don't understand about this answer. If they cannot permanently patch the EMMC firmware (presumably because it is not writable), how is the 32kb of zeros corrupting that same unwritable firmware. If the firmware is kept on EMMC it should be writable though I find it difficult to believe the EMMC firmware (essentially the "OS" handling the blocks on the EMMC is being stored on the regular EMMC itself, subject to wearlevel algorithms) If that stuff about the firmware was just miscommunication and we are back to talking about filesystem corruption, I can write 32KB of zeros to any of the filesystems just using "dd" and "/dev/zero". These can be repaired by reformatting the partition. There is some "special" corruption or damage going on here, IMO.”

I follow what you are saying there and that has been my fundamental question for a while now, if something is unwritable, how is it getting overwritten with zeros’?

In closing like I mentioned earlier I’m new here and would like to learn as much as possible about android, it’s interesting as all hell… that said this community is amazing, the amount of work that you guys have put forth here without compensation solely to improve other’s experience with their phones is impressive. THANK YOU! Seriously… I’ll keep an eye on this thread and probably end up helping by flashing in the manner you've requested; I’d just like to do a little more reading first so I’m comfortable and as informed as I can possibly be, but would like to help out as much as my currently limited abilities will allow. And again, thanks guys your work is very much appreciated.