can anyone even buy an m57sli any more? Was it an unfortunate mistake -- never repeated -- that FLASH was not directly accessible? If the m57sli is an exception and we'll never see this problem again, I say we drop it. Copying all of flash into ram sounds bad. If we have to cope with this problem in future, maybe we're stuck with accessor functions.
But FLASH is so slow I doubt that the cost of an accessor function is going to kill us. Function calls run in nanoseconds, and if SPI really is only 40 MB/sec., then that's 25 ns/byte.
ron