I2C is a very simple bus format with some common conventions attached to it that are followed by most (but not all) devices. You can find a pretty good summary of how it works on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2C
For devices which follow this convention, the device exposes registers that usually have a 1-byte register address and contain somewhere between 1 to 4 bytes of data (the convention isn't super strict in many aspects, so a lot of it is device dependent). In order to write to a register you're supposed to make two consecutive transactions (with what's called a "repeated start" in between): one transaction that writes the 1-byte register address, and one transaction that writes the 1-4 bytes of data you want to write into that register. Similarly, for a read you first do a write transaction with the register address, followed by a read transaction where the device will return the register contents.
i2c_readb() and i2c_writeb() are convenience wrappers that encapsulate this whole thing for registers containing 1-byte values for you. This is what you want for most devices, but sometimes you have a device that doesn't adhere to the conventions and needs special treatment (e.g. maybe it doesn't really have a concept of registers at all and just treats all data as a single stream or something). For those cases you have i2c_read_raw() and i2c_write_raw(): these just directly read or write any amount of raw bytes you want out on the bus. Therefore, 'val = i2c_readb(1, 2, 3, 4)' is roughly equivalent to 'reg = 3 && i2c_write_raw(1, 2, ®, 1) && i2c_read_raw(1, 2, &val, 1)'.
Also, I think all of these functions only work on non-x86 devices right now so they're probably not really helpful to you (I'd be surprised if they even compile and link for your board). The I2C API is unfortunately one of those areas where x86 and non-x86 coreboot still lead very separate side-by-side lives right now. For x86 you probably need the i2c_dev_xxx() functions, which should in theory work similar but I have no experience with them. You might also need to use the smbus_xxx() functions instead (SMBUS is some kinda-the-same-but-not-quite thing related to I2C on x86 that I never bothered to fully understand).
On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Haleigh Novak haleigh@edt.com wrote:
Hello All,
I am currently trying to send POST codes from Coreboot (downloaded approximately a month ago) to a Beagle I2C/SPI reader, specifically via i2c. I don't know the register needed for i2c_writeb() so I figured I would use i2c_raw_write(). In general since I have been unable to locate anything explaining the difference between the two functions I would really appriciate it if someone could explain it or direct me to where I can find documentation. I am hoping that the explaination/resource will either tell me where / or direct me to how I can figure out where the i2c_raw_write will write to (if it will just write directly to the Beagle or somewhere else)? Or would it be better to send it to a register with i2c_writeb()? I am running Coreboot on an ASROCK Mainboard, model IMB-A180.
Thank you.
HN
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