> It’s interesting to me that Linux doesn’t have support for putting ext/xfs/… on top of MTD/UBI devices
Raw NAND has a number of characteristics which are incredibly unpleasant for a traditional filesystem to deal with, including:
1) No small writes. You usually have to program a whole page at a time, which is often larger than a sector on a hard disk (~16 KiB). Filesystems which are accustomed to being able to flush single-byte writes to disk will be very disappointed by this.
2) No overwriting. Once a page has been written to, you can't write to it again until it's been erased. This makes even emulating small writes difficult.
3) Erase is a big hammer. It operates on a large (32 - 128 MiB) group of pages and erases them all at once.
4) Bad sectors. Sometimes an erase block is just bad on chip and you have to work around it. And, as flash wears out, blocks can go bad, and you'll just have to hope there's a spare available.
Bottom line is -- if you want to write a filesystem that works with flash directly, you have to write it to work that way from the start. Modifying a traditional filesystem like ext4 to run on flash would effectively be a complete rewrite.